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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        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.

        2. lanfy*

          I am a sucker for self-deprecating wit. Dear Mr Stud Muffin, look me up if you’re ever in Wales ;)

      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.

        2. Jellyfish Catcher*

          A great saying that is so adaptable: straight and serious; dismissive or with a subtle smile.
          Here’s to you, stud muffin!

    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.

      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.)

          1. RC*

            And here I thought the most common problem was that standard shirt orders *only* include like 4 smalls if that, the rest M, L, XL. So as a small (or XS)-sized female person, I always look like a 12 year old in a too-big shirt. “You can just alter it!” in my copious free time? Wild that they’d think the opposite was okay though.

            These malicious compliances are all 10/10.

            1. LBD*

              Rather than “You can just alter it!”, a possible correction to inadequate ordering/stocking would be, “Take it to a dry cleaners that does alterations and bring us the receipt!”. Too small leaves fewer options.

            2. Wolf*

              I wear an XS. I tend to get stuck with whatever size is left over, and get told “oh well, it fits” . I’m petty enough to just accept it and gleefully look stupid for a day at an outside event if I have to.
              The day I complained was when I got a mens’ size XL labcoat, and the sleeves were so long and wide that I accidentally lit my sleeve on fire while working near a bunsen burner.

              1. Mr McGregor's Gardener*

                Howie lab coats for the win (elasticated wrists).

                I’m blessed up front, so if the coat’s big enough round the chest, it’s too big everywhere else.

                1. Rainbow*

                  1000%, and I also work in a lab building. I don’t know why because I look like an adult the rest of the time, but I really need a teenagers’ lab coat, which some places have around for outreach days.
                  People genuinely seem to think that a huge “unisex” (ie: men’s) t-shirt fits everyone just because everyone can put their head through the neck hole.

        2. LBD*

          I think in some cases it is that larger sizes are priced higher when bought whole sale. We face that issue with branded clothing that we also sell to the public, but have come to terms with the fact that our profit margin on larger sizes is going to be smaller.

      2. Corporate Event Planner*

        Branded apparel is notorious for running small, and I hate it when decision makers want to make everyone wear branded jackets, shirts, etc. As an event planner, I encounter this a lot. I’m a plus sized woman, and I dread every time I have to get one of these shirts or jackets. Unisex sizes typically don’t work for anyone (much less women). Women’s sizes are cut narrower and don’t fit across the chest or hips. Men’s sizes are cut larger overall but don’t fit women well (arms are too long, shoulders too bulky, not made for curvy people). I can’t tell you how humiliating it is to choose the largest size offered and it still not fit. The last time it happened, it was a button down shirt, and it simply would not fit across my chest. I had to wear it unbuttoned with a plain white shirt underneath, and I wasn’t the only one.

        1. Fleur-de-Lis*

          I literally did not go to an event (marching in a parade with my employer) because they were issued sweaters, and I knew – I KNEW – that the largest sweater was going to be a tube that didn’t allow for the fact that I’m a plus-sized woman, not a hefty dude. People miss out on other things when corporate clothing isn’t diverse enough in options, like being a participant in a highly-visible community event where it’s important to show your face….

        2. Grizabella the Glamour Cat*

          “Branded apparel is notorious for running small…”

          Yeah, wtf is up with that anyway? It’s bad enough when companies don’t have enough sense to order a wide range of sizes, but that way that stuff always runs so small really compounds the problem. I don’t get it.

        3. K*

          Not work place related but I signed up for a race once specifically because I liked the shirt graphic and sized up because race shirts generally run small, and still wound up having to give the shirt to my friend’s petite pre-teen daughter. Idk if they were using a 1950s size chart or what.
          (That was at least 5 years ago but apparently I’m still bitter)

      3. kicking-k*

        A very substantial proportion. My husband, who is built like a Tolkien elf, wears a large…

        I remember the uniform shirts I had as a hotel waitress in my late teens. They bought XXL men’s shirts, and only XXL, on the grounds that they should cover almost everyone. They weren’t too huge on me around the chest but were very loose everywhere else and the cuffs had to be turned back twice; my sister just swam in them and ended up sewing unofficial darts just so all the extra fabric wouldn’t keep working loose; and a couple of the big lads could barely fit their shoulders in them…

        The place was under new management by next summer. That was not the only reason. It is now converted to apartments!

    7. AlwhoisthatAl*

      Sorry guys, it’s actually a Derby, UK accent, but the story is true and I am the person featured. I have lost some weight now, but I still won’t wear teal.

      1. LabSnep*

        I think you are fabulous and even if you are just an apple slice now, I hope you are still a stud muffin because that story was hilarious.

    8. Steve for Work Purposes*

      I did something similar in college, pre-transition, not out of protest but out of lack of other options. A previous job (campus dining) had dark blue polo shirts in a range of sizes, but the sizes topped out at a unisex size that was not very big and definitely did not fit anyone above a D cup, and it was the same pool of polo shirts used by all the student workers. The buttons barely buttoned and I had to wear an undershirt underneath to avoid flashing the other students. Unfortunately those of us in this position just got told to deal with it and wear undershirts.I felt like 10lb of sausage shoved into a 5lb casing, but the job paid better than a lot of other local jobs so I put up with it. I wish we’d had someone like LW, it would’ve made things a lot easier!

    2. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

      I’m having a crap day, so I think I just found the way I’m going to cheer myself up. ;)

    4. Chick-n-boots*

      These are the moments I desperately wish I could deploy the “Ginger get the popcorn” GIF.

    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)

    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?

      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.

        1. Margaret Cavendish*

          I’m not in tech, but I have the same story. I was working on a project where I was the only subject expert – everyone else was IT or project management, and none of us had experience with the product we were rolling out. I sent my boss an email saying I think we’re being too aggressive with the project timeline – six months isn’t long enough because of Reasons, and my recommendation is that we extend it to a year.

          The project took a year. And everyone but me was surprised.

          1. Grumpy Elder Millennial*

            Been there, and I was the PM for some of it. I just didn’t set timelines without going to the people who understand the things things and asking them how long the things are going to take. Unfortunately, executives always had an end date in mind and I ended up having to invent a BS timeline that everyone doing the work knew was nonsense.

        2. hbc*

          I have definitely been in a meeting where I threw my hands up and said “If we’re going to cut all the rework time after testing, why not just cut all the testing time since our assumption is that we’re not going to find any problems worth fixing?” I want my fantasy internally consistent, whether it’s a novel or a project plan.

      2. Ellie*

        I am working for a Todd now… I am just hoping I outlast him. He has got to mess up, Todd style, sooner or later.

        He tried to solve our budget problem by slashing 20% off of all of our estimates. No other changes required, apparently. Work more efficiently… yeah.

    6. iglwif*

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

      That story was INCREDIBLY satisfying to read!!!

      1. Ellie*

        It really was. My fear though is that if I tried that, it would come back down to, ‘You’re the engineer. You should have known not to obey your manager’. I absolutely love it when the grandboss is sensible, and understands where the problem is.

    7. Allegra*

      “that decision was direction from the program rather than a technical decision, so Todd would be better positioned to speak to it.”
      This phrasing was SO GOOD.

    8. Snark*

      “I respond that decision was direction from the program rather than a technical decision, so Todd would be better positioned to speak to it.”

      Meanwhile *this* masterpiece. Leverage synergies with the underside of this municipal transportation solution, Todd.

    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

      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.

        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.

          1. MigraineMonth*

            As a woman in tech I’m very used to companies offering only unisex or men’s branded attire. I am still in awe of the time I went to Grace Hopper and every booth had women’s sizes! Still managed to be a miss for me, though. Google offered sizes down to XS, which was awkwardly large on me, and Microsoft only had up to L (they ran out of larger), which was tight enough to show the stitching on my bra.

      3. WS*

        When I was a grad student worker at university enrollment day they required us to wear a t-shirt that only went up to size 14 womens (and size 18 mens but my chest still wouldn’t fit in that) I was size 20, so I neatly safety-pinned a small one to my regular t-shirt. The next day they’d printed out badges for us to wear instead.

    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.

      1. Cai*

        Perfect opportunity for some malicious compliance – you show up wearing the t-shirt as a crop top around your chest!

    1. AlwhoisthatAl*

      The most difficult part was keeping a straight face that day, especially when walking into the shared kitchen…

      2. Macropodidae*

        I took my kid and their friends to an anime con once and a larger woman was dressed as She Hulk, entirely painted in green, wearing shredded shorts and a way too small shirt with her belly hanging out and also painted green. I thought it was a BRILLIANT costume and your story made that pop into my head 12 years later. You are the Teal Hulk Muffin we deserve.

      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!

        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.

        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.

    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.

      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.

        1. Not Tom, Just Petty*

          This. It’s not a negative, it’s a fact. Engineers are not simply binary thinkers: this will work, this won’t work. They are broad thinkers. The come with receipts.

      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.

    3. Palmer*

      I love when it’s easy to get idiots to put things in writing. It’s a beautiful gift when they make covering your butt easy.

  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.

    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.

      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!

      2. A Person*

        I’m not sure that’s actually malicious! I’ve been on the other side of this, where I was a new manager and actually wanted detailed information about how much time people spent on certain tasks (because the department was considering buying a device which would require big changes to work practices, but would potentially be much faster than using hand tools), but people would give only incredibly vague answers.

        1. Bill and Heather's Excellent Adventure*

          The malice is in the compliance, where Cheeruson went out of their way to detail every little thing they did, not necessarily the manager’s request.

    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”

      1. dePizan*

        When my job first started remote work during the pandemic, we were told to turn in a daily summary of our tasks and how long it had taken to complete. I studiously filled mine out weekly and turned them in for the next two years. I would on a rare occasion get a “thanks” from my boss, but that was the sole acknowledgement/feedback.

        It was only after a new person started at the end of 2023 and I was mentioning the lists that I found out no one else in our company was still doing them, they had all stopped in the first year and that our boss had only started them for a problem employee who left two months into the pandemic anymore. I was kind of furious that after all that time my boss never thought to mention it to me. When I stopped, my boss still never said a word about it.

        2. TheOtherLaura*

          When my boss wanted such a list because they didn’t understand how I could spend 80% of my time on required paperwork and urgent customer calls, I added “Creating and updating MyTasksReportList” to the list. It was a very granular list. It also included every interruption from boss because they needed to find some paperwork or wanted to know why some customer’s not that urgent issue was not yet done.

      2. azvlr*

        I had to create a report and send it prior to my weekly 1x1s (which scheduled at 8am on Monday mornings, ugh!) This was for a manager I never met in person, so I felt the 1x1s should be important to her and would have been a good way for her to show that I mattered to the team. But no, she frequently was late for these meetings to the point where I started logging it, and would often cancel or reschedule (via 2am emails) after I had rushed to get to the office at 8am sharp. The report also took significant time to prepare that would have been better spent JUST DOING THE WORK!
        When we did meet I soon realized the reports weren’t even being read. I added a Rick Roll to my report, and she never commented on it the entire time I was there, but spent plenty of time talking about how I didn’t manage my time well.

        1. goddessoftransitory*

          Hah, that reminds me of Anne Lamott’s saying that at a temp job she had she figured out a lot of the triplicate forms she was supposed to be filling out could be ignored without any real fallout.

    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.

      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.

        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.

          1. Disappointed Australien*

            I once wrote in my timesheet “time listening to project manager bloviate” on a death march project. Every week for a few months of 60 hour weeks there’d be 3-6 hours of “listen to manager”. And those timesheets were accepted by management, my pay slip showed the accrued overtime/TOIL, no questions were asked. I complained about the manager being a time wasting moron, I got told to learn from his expertise..

            Until the project was finally more or less delivered, SHTF and I quit. Suddenly that 6 weeks of TOIL owed was a big deal and they were not going to pay it out. So we went to (legal system) arbitration, the company said “we don’ wanna”, I said here’s my pay slips” and they had to pay it.

        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.

        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)

        4. Cinderblock*

          I don’t have to bill my time at my current litigation paralegal job, but at a previous employer we had to to do it for every minute of the day. We had to keep extra detailed billing records because of things related to our practice area. I usually billed half an hour for time spent billing my hours. If I drove to the courthouse to file documents in three different cases (in the days before efiling) I had to divide up my time, mileage, and parking three ways.

      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.

        1. MigraineMonth*

          I worked at a company that made us track our time to the 15-minute increment, despite the fact that the role was exempt and non-billable. They claimed this was so that they could collect data about how long projects took, but it was actually so they could bully you into working more hours: there was no time code for taking a break, but if you logged less than 40 hours in any week your manager was notified to talk to you.

          I used to log non-project time (coffee and bathroom breaks, email, walking to meetings, talking with coworkers) to “admin tasks” until my manager told me an hour per day was too much. I switched to logging half an hour to “admin tasks” and half an hour to “logging my time” each day and they left me alone.

          1. Annie*

            haha, I love that. Same hour long time period of doing non work-focused info, but just broken up into admin tasks and logging my time. Brilliant!

          2. Camellia*

            I just included that time in with the other projects’ time. 1.25 hours on your project, .25 break? Okay, 1.5 hours on project.

      3. Anita Brake*

        Oh, this reminds me that I did that back in the late 1980’s. One of those “family” companies” I was too young to realize I shouldn’t work at. They thought we weren’t doing enough work and so they wanted a list of everything we did all day long. I completed it to the T, adding in 1-2 minutes at the end of each task or activity for filling out the form. Ours didn’t last long, either.

    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.

      1. Plate of Wings*

        That’s so crazy to me! I have worked off a ticket system and my boss could, and did, get everything he needed FROM THE SYSTEM!

        How wonderful! A list of assignments with dates and stakeholder names and statuses, all with a little avatar of my face next to them. You can even see what I did to fulfill each request, amazing.

    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

    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!?

      3. Aneurin*

        I’ve never been happier to read & take in someone’s username after reading their comment in my life

        2. Observer*

          Add me to the people who are relieved by the user name.

          And I’m sure he just does NOT understand! He was never mean! He ONLY told the truth! And he NEVER yelled. He just got animated!

          I’m tired just thinking about it.

        3. goddessoftransitory*

          Lord, me too. Can’t wait for her ex to realize all that “nothing” she’s been doing consists of running the entire damn household.

      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.

        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.

        2. Plate of Wings*

          Fixed boiler and took care of all human and animal dependents? I would fight for a promotion so you didn’t have to work!

        3. Ellis Bell*

          My grandmother was like that. My grandfather worked in the boiler room of a merchant ship, and as a rigger loading and unloading cargo, but whenever she was asked what her husband did for a living she would say “Oh he doesn’t work, he goes to sea” instead of saying “merchant seaman”. It’s like when toddlers think if you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist.

      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.

    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.

      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.

        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!)

    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.

    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.

      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.

      2. Hot Flash Gordon*

        These types of lists are also really good to reference when managers are writing reviews (or if you’re writing your self-review. I can never remember what I did the first quarter or two of the year, so it’s nice to have something concrete to look at.

    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.

      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.

        1. Your former password resetter*

          Extra ironic that it’s a bunch of turbo-rich people with cushy board jobs telling you that.
          Like what are you guys contributing on an average workday exactly?

      2. Devo Forevo*

        I hope you’d be a good enough board member to respect that the professionals working for the org can be treated like adults in the first place. If someone is so curious to see what we “do all day,” they’re welcome to shepherd large groups of clumsy people through tiny rooms while trying to get them excited about marquetry like I did.

        1. Your former password resetter*

          if a high level manager doesn’t know what people actually do all day, then that’s pretty damning of their knowledge of the organization they’re supposed to be directing.

    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.

    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.

    13. Sack of Benevolent Trash Marsupials*

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

    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.

    15. Erin*

      I work in major gifts at an independent school and our board decided they wanted to become more intimately involved in fundraising until they saw how many prospects we had and how many meetings my colleague and I had every week. Bad board chairs never know what they want, but always think they can do someone’s job better than they can.

      1. Disappointed Australien*

        “anything I don’t understand is easy” sums up far too many people’s approach. Chesterton’s Fence is another handy thing to be able to explain to people.

    16. Sunshine State*

      That’s brilliant! I should do that. We have an owner who doesn’t trust employees when we work remotely (my opinion) so every person who works remotely for whatever reason (we’re mostly in-office), has to fill out an every-15 minute time log for the day or week. I take things literally so I would take precise notes of every single thing I worked on, recording each item dutifully in the proper time slot. Didn’t take long to realize that all he did with the reports was glance over them to make sure work was being done and say “Good job.” Noted. Next time I’ll do my work and at the end of the day, fill in the overall projects I worked on which will be way less stressful for me. Wish I’d thought to list every detail, every phone call, everything.

    17. Meep*

      I had a boss who would call me at 7:00 AM when she knew I was driving in and would literally watch from her window so she could see me leave to call me. I decided to do something similar and document this literal 2 hour waste of my time (it was just her whinging about work) in our time log system, because it was technically “work”. I was salary exempt, so we played “work 10-12 hours a week because I don’t have to pay you” until we didn’t.

      Yes, I could’ve not picked up while driving, but she was verbally and financially abusive so it was easier to commit malice complacence and record everything little thing like she wanted.

    18. But Of Course*

      We had to send in two lists – one in the morning with everything we expected to get done and then one in the afternoon with everything we had done. As a neurodivergent person, this is hell, because I don’t experience the passage of time well enough to estimate anything in the am list, and then I felt like a liar in the afternoon list even if the reason I hadn’t gotten things done was “actually our website broke unexpectedly” or another emergency.

      We went into contract negotiations at the start of the pandemic and negotiated that away; I don’t think my manager was actually reading them either.

  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?

    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.

      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!

        2. It's Marie - Not Maria*

          I had a Boss who would change her mind whenever someone else spoke with her, so I would resend the recap email “Per our conversation this morning, we agreed on X and Y.” The next day, when she would say A and B, I would remind her about our conversation the previous day. She would say “We didn’t talk about that,” and I would forward the recap to her. Her response was usually “I feel differently about that now.” I was glad when I left that messed up company that thrived on chaos.

          1. An Australian in London*

            “Per our conversation today, when shown the email about your conversation yesterday where we agreed on X and Y, you said you feel differently about it now and want A and B instead. Total time spent so far this week on rework and documenting rework: 5.5 hours.”

    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).

    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

      1. metadata minion*

        Oh noooo! I can totally see being confused by that phrase if you’ve never heard it before.

        A colleague and I were mildly panicking about having to write a paper for a conference, when neither of us had presented at a conference or written an academic paper in ages, only to find out that when they say “paper”, they mean “presentation”. In only a few fields do you actually have to put large numbers of words on paper with citations and an abstract and such, but they will still call it “presenting a paper”, and be deeply confused as to why you thought it meant writing anything.

      2. K*

        Oh man. Once we got a new director who invited us (in December) for a “fire side chat.” I assumed this was supposed to be some kind of holiday thing and had some important project I was in the weeds on so didn’t go — only to get written up for missing a mandatory meeting.

    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

      2. Iain C*

        That reminds me of the story…

        Engineer is given sound instructions by their partner:

        “Go buy a chicken, and if they have eggs buy a dozen.”

        Comes home with twelve chickens.

        “Why do we have twelve chickens?”

        “They had eggs”.

        1. TheOtherLaura*

          I recently found that all four of the IT/SW dev people around my coffee table failed at filling out official paperwork (“I have no idea what they are talking about, I spent six hours on research, creating hypotheses and testing them, and working through logical conundrums, and I get it back with ‘this is all wrong'”) while none of the others (historian resp. customer support) found official paperwork more than a minor nuisance.

    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?)

      1. Plate of Wings*

        This can be a gift you can use :) I had a coworker like yourself who found out in the handbook that we had a floating holiday with very limited restrictions. The department head hadn’t known about it, and my coworker made sure we all knew about it and how to take it.

        He also found some flexibility in our commuter benefit and some other stuff I’m forgetting. Never in a million years would any of us ever read the handbook. What a great team mate.

    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.

    10. Meep*

      I get this.

      My manager gets fussy when he thinks I am “rushing” things (usually showing him where something is in the Google Drive) and always tells me to “slow down and listen”. And then gets fussy when I do as he says because he is a TALKER. Like it will literally take him five sentences to say what can be said in one.

      Actually, a couple of my coworkers are like that, but he is usually having me share my screen with him when this happens so I cannot keep working like I can with my other talkers. lol.

    11. timdrums*

      I lost thousands of dollars on this problem once. I am a freelance musician and I applied for a PPP loan during the pandemic. There was an online form to fill out that included checking boxes for any activities that applied to your work. One of the listed things was “adult entertainment”. I absolutely entertain adults all the time as part of my work so I checked the box. Later I got a denial letter saying because I work in pornography I could not get a PPP loan. I was so confused. When I called I was told that “adult entertainment” only means pornography and not what the words actually mean, and that if you make a mistake checking boxes you are forever banned from that loan and there is no redress.

  9. not nice, don't care*

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

  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.

    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.

  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.

    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?

      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!

    4. Teaching teacher*

      I’m wondering – was his work behind that week? or did he actually do his job since he had to account for the time?

    5. Ma sheena*

      As a new manager going to use this on the people who push back on providing two sentence updates with this

  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.

        1. Nah*

          Got a membership explicitly for that delicious chocolate mousse cake too have at a graduation party. The discount on laptops and bulk food was a happy bonus. Now if they could just bring the original churros back……

        1. Iain C*

          There is a Reddit sub I am addicted to. This comment thread is actually slightly higher quality snapshot.

          r/maliciouscompliance

          There is a spin off:
          r/delicious compliance
          And
          r/wholesomecompliance
          for the kind versions

      3. MigraineMonth*

        I do feel that there has to be something extra for it a story to be of *malicious* compliance instead of just… doing what you’ve been specifically told to do even after warnings that it’s not going to go well.

        Like, if you decide to practice on 15 cakes first so those cakes couldn’t be sold, that feels malicious. Just not being good at writing on cakes doesn’t feel like enough of an “eff you”.

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

          I kind of realized this after I posted, but since I don’t log in to comment, can’t do anything about it now ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    3. Orange You Glad*

      I worked at a grocery store in high school and college, usually the late night shifts after the bakery closed. One manager would always ask me to write on the cakes because I was a girl. My handwriting is terrible and I would warn, but still had to do it. Sorry to everyone whose cakes I messed up.

    4. nnn*

      This has me curious: if you’re trying to write on a cake and make a mistake, is it possible to remove the frosting and re-do it? Or is it permanently spoiled?

      1. Nah*

        Typically yes, since it’s a later of frosting over top the main base layer. Gets more complicated if the rest of the decorations have already been applied though, and some food dyes bleed too much to refrost the area without it looking obvious that’s what happened.

      2. Hot Flash Gordon*

        You can pull the frosting off with a toothpick or a small offset spatula and redo it. It can get tricky if the frosting is a really dark color like red, black, or blue.

    5. Hot Flash Gordon*

      I used to work at a bakery as well. We didn’t get trained on writing on cakes unless you really wanted to learn and took initiative. BUT! My manager also supported trying our best as long as we stressed to the customer that we weren’t decorators and it may look like a kindergartener wrote on it. I would just tell customers “look, I’ll do this, but it’ll look unprofessional, so don’t get mad, I’m just in college, OK?” Everyone was fine with it because they were buying the cake at the last minute at 7:00 at night. The only person I really felt bad about was the person who ordered a cake for her kid and the decorator misspelled her kid’s name. She was really grateful that I fixed it to the best of my ability and that I told the shift manager to comp it.

    6. sulky-anne*

      I used to get asked to do this when I worked in an understaffed grocery store bakery and we got zero training. My coworkers were so helpful and told customers we could do custom drawings and write messages in non-Latin characters. It stressed me out so much. I remember having to draw some kind of terrible canoe, but apparently none of the work was bad enough to excuse me from doing it.

  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.

    1. MCL*

      HAHAHA amazing. Talk about pennywise and pound foolish on the part of your employer. I would have done the same.

    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.

      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.

      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.

          1. KJC*

            We always tip at least $1 per bag, but we try to do it discreetly where other people can’t see it, for example by hanging back for a few seconds. I’m guessing if you’re looking for it, you might notice some folks tipping.

        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.

          1. TK*

            Most remote parking lots at airports are actually contracted out, not run by the airport themselves. So the driver doesn’t actually work for the airport.

        3. Bitte Meddler*

          Oh, wow, I’ve never tipped an airport shuttle driver upfront. Just a buck or two at the end if they had to help me with my bags.

          I did, however, tip the shuttle driver who took me from the airport to my car in remote parking on Christmas night $50 just because, damn, working Christmas night sucks.

          I had visited my dad several states away for the first time in, like, 13 years, and thanked her for making it possible. (If she wasn’t working, I wouldn’t have been able to park in remote parking).

      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.

        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.

          1. Seeking Second Childhood*

            I’d add something for hotel housekeeping each day they’re cleaning. ( Ask someone else how much though; I haven’t really travelled since the pandemic.)

            1. AnReAr*

              My parents’ rule has always been |($2/bed used)×nights stayed|, then round up to the nearest multiple of 5. If it’s a nice suite with a kitchen and you used it that’s +($1)day on the equation and make sure the dishes are clean if they were provided.

              We make sure to clean up after ourselves and don’t leave specific messes behind that take long to clean, but housekeeping still needs to do laundry and wipe counters and vacuum. If we leave an outstanding mess that would take more than 10 minutes to clean that specific spot it also gets a flat $5 added on top of the normal equation.

              1. AnReAr*

                I realized I combined math and communication short hand so I want to clarify: all the / mean per, not divide. So in pure math formula it’s
                (($2)bed used)×nights stayed + (($1)kitchen used)×nights stayed
                Then round that up to the nearest multiple of 5. After add $5 per large mess if applicable.

        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.

        3. Funko Pops Day*

          The general rule is that if someone is carrying luggage for you, you should tip them. Shuttle driver: just carrying on and off of shuttle, so $1-2/bag is fine. Curbside checkin at airport/hotel bellman who is doing more work: more like $5-10 per bag

        4. Phenolphthalein*

          I’m autistic and not from the US, and I went to live there for a bit. I was a student though so often went around in groups with others I could copy, and didn’t have the money for unusual experiences.
          I went back for a work trip last year. And I just constantly googled who you were supposed to tip and how much. I also over-tipped constantly I’m sure to try and avoid anxiety, but rather be an eccentric generous foreigner than the opposite.
          But you’re not missing a lot by not visiting. It’s a big place, but the rest of the world is much bigger.

      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.

        1. Don P.*

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

          1. darsynia*

            True, true. I’m remembering from when I was under 15 and he talked about it feeling unfair to the drivers who weren’t chatty, but you’re right.

    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.

        1. Texan in exile on her phone*

          If reasonable. Former company allowed $30 for supper in Chicago, less for cheaper cities.

      2. Grenelda Thurber*

        I have an email folder named “evidence” for any email I might need to document such silly (and not so silly) things.

      3. Cmdrshprd*

        Eh idk that $60 for dinner is reasonable, maybe if it’s the only place around for miles and that’s the cost of a single entre, side, and drink. But living/working in a major metro area $40 for dinner seems reasonable.

        I get where you are coming from in thinking that $20*4+$60= $140, versus $40*5= $200. But while on the whole/week it’s cheaper, sometimes optics individually matter more rather than the full scope. So a single meal of $60 could be harder to justify than all $40 meals.

        But also idk the your boss look at all your meals and calculate, this one meal is more expensive, but the others are cheaper, versus being able to look at meal expenses quickly and see is it more or less than $40.

      4. ProfessionalismPaper*

        I had a per diem for a work trip to Miami Beach, and the last night used it all for a stone crab dinner. I got some flack from our travel office because it exceeded the “standard dinner allowance” of $35 (but was under the per diem of $65). I had to fight pretty hard on that one but they eventually gave in … probably because I was under $65 for every day of the trip.

    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?

        2. Bitte Meddler*

          LOL!

          I once had a travel plan kicked back because I wasn’t taking the cheapest flight available between Dallas and Philadelphia.

          I had booked a nonstop flight (during non-peak hours) and the system / person thought I should take an overnight flight with two layovers, for 12 hours of travel time… each way.

          I was told I needed to justify my choice of flights.

          Fine.

          I did some simple math breaking my salary down to an hourly pay rate, then pointed out the poor cost-benefit ratio. I also pointed out that I’d only be in Philly for half a day for an important meeting and that it was absurd to expect me to spend 24 hours traveling for a 4-hour meeting, especially when I’d then be claiming the extra 18 hours of sitting in airports and inside planes as comp time. But, hey, if the company wanted me not working for the equivalent of 5-day work week to save money on a half-day meeting, then I guess I’d have to do it.

          BTW, the cost difference between the two flight schedules was something like $250, not $2500.

          My original flight choices were approved.

          1. A perfectly normal-size space bird*

            Oh, that reminds me of the last business travel I had. The meeting was one that absolutely could have been a Zoom call, especially since all our other clients did the meeting as a Zoom call just fine. But this client insisted it was impossible to do it over Zoom and we all had to meet in person.

            My employer was not happy about this and said look, our employees are remote, they’re all going to have to travel to be in-person at this meeting. Employer said we will set it up on our campus only if you agree to pay travel expenses and reimburse our employees according to our expense policy. The client happily signed the contract, assuring my employer that it was no big deal and they know they’ll get far more value out of this than a silly Zoom call.

            There were 17 attendees. It was an all day meeting and employer has a policy that employees must be checked into a hotel (if not local) the night before and not leave until the day after the meeting, for safety and productivity. So that’s at least two nights per person in the swanky corporate hotel with the full kitchens and living rooms. All but one person had to fly in, all needed rental cars at the destination because the airport was a good distance from the campus and the one driver got a four day rental.

            Most of us were US-based, but we had people from all three coasts, one in Alaska, plus two people from Puerto Rico. The two from Puerto Rico had a harder time getting flights at this particular point in time so they got two extra travel days.

            One person was from rural South America and they had to take a private ferry and seaplane just to get to the nearest airstrip that had an airplane that was even allowed to land at the nearest commercial airport. She showed us how much it cost and we all died laughing at the client.

            Our employer gave us a per diem that we’re allowed to flex however we want (so we can do some cheaper meals and then blow the rest at an expensive restaurant). As long as we didn’t go over the per diem when it’s averaged by number of travel/meeting days, they don’t care about individual meal costs. They also encouraged tipping and reimbursed tips up to 30%.

            Not only that, but we were all paid for our travel days as if we were working and overtime rules applied. Since travel days were often longer than 8 hours and the meeting was on Friday, everyone had overtime. Our jobs are project based so our wages were paid out of the client budgets, which means the client was paying for all this overtime.

            On top of that, on the day of the meeting, we were all given an hour paid lunch that was catered by three local restaurants and we had our choice of a gorgeous array of Mediterranean, Japanese, and Mexican foods.

            I don’t know how much was spent for this one day in-person meeting that should have been a Zoom call, but I do know that client never again insisted on in-person meetings. They’ve been Zoom calls ever since.

            1. Beany*

              OMG. I’d be scared to look at the spreadsheet for all that, but it must have been in the five digits.

              1. New Jack Karyn*

                Oh, I think that went six digits. International flights? Two nights in nice hotels for 16 people? Generous per diem, plus rental cars? Easy to crack $100,000.

      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…

    9. Adverb*

      I had a similar experience with a company that would only reimburse expenses paid with the corporate credit card I was issued. This meant I could get reimbursed for the $3 breakfast I bought from a food cart in NYC in 2000. Like the poster above, I took the only reasonable route. I booked a hotel room that cost $75-$100 more but included breakfast and hired a car to pick me up and drop me off for 3-4x the price of a taxi (it was 1998 and taxis didn’t take cards).

      1. Edwina*

        It sounds like these policy makers have zero common sense!

        I used to always put my tips through because OF COURSE they will reimburse me for my WORK expenses while in WORK travel. They did. They might have just not wanted to deal with my outrage if they said no. I don’t know…

        1. Ama*

          Having witnessed my share of reimbursement policy crafting – what usually happens is that someone senior gets upset about employees spending a lot of money on X expense, so they make a rule limiting X expense. But no one bothers to look at the entire budget and say “actually we spend way more per person on Y and Z and that’s what everyone is going to do if we limit X.”

          I used to have a boss who would get upset that I wanted to spend 6 dollars a dozen on pens for the office (because they were good quality and would last a year or two) and made me buy the 2 dollars a dozen box that ran out of ink in a month. Did we spend more on pens per year? Of course, but we spent less per order and those were the only numbers he actually looked at because he had to approve my purchase order requests.

          1. Jackalope*

            I was in a position to create a financial policy including the rules around reimbursements. I took great pleasure in making it as reasonable as possible, including that we covered tipping, that flights could be the most reasonable option (ie time of day flying, direct flights instead of layovers if it was an option), what per diem would be used and how it would adjust for cost of living, etc. Probably not perfect, but at least we were trying to be reasonable about it.

    10. StarTrek Nutcase*

      I started a job where one duty was at 9am daily to transport the cafeteria lunch proceeds to the Accounting Dept. which was 2 buildings away (~120 yds). There was a golf cart to use during bad weather, but it was a great 5 min walk on good days. For the time out (~20 mins) P had to cover for me. I made the mistake of saying that I enjoyed the walk to my supervisor, P (aka evil b*tch) on my 3d day. So suddenly I “had” to take the cart because of possible robbery (it was a closed campus & never robbed).

      From that day forward, I used the cart and took the long way around to Accounting. I learned the entire huge campus (60+ bldgs. on 2000+ acres) during my trips. Trip time was easily doubled but when P asked, I simply said how slow Accounting could be (they “could” but weren’t!). I loved knowing P had to deal with calls & walk-ins at a particularly busy time & even better when they would simply say they’d check back instead. I wasn’t perfect but most staff wanted to avoid P’s nastiness. (In 40+ yrs across 12 or so jobs, P was truly the worst supervisor or person I worked with. It was a long 16 months before I promoted out.)

  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.

    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.

      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.

        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.

          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.

            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.

      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.

    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.

    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.

      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.

        1. Phenolphthalein*

          That’s weird. I practically begged my floor installers to take the remaining floor slats (worth <£100 though to be fair ) with them when they'd finished, and they said no. I thought they, being floor people, would have more use for them than me!

      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.

        1. Goldfeesh*

          A two-door hanging cabinet secured to the wall with one whole screw. Fortunately, when it fell years later it just fell onto the washer and dryer.

          1. Random Bystander*

            Reminds me of a situation my parents dealt with. When I was in kindergarten (so a little over 50 years ago), they had the house built and moved into the house halfway through my kindergarten year. Over the years, they did make various improvements to the house, but when they redid the kitchen, they didn’t replace the cabinets, they just got new doors for the ones in the area officially dividing kitchen from dining room (kitchen had fridge, stove, turn a corner, cabinets, sink facing the window looking over the back yard, more cabinets, and then about 4 feet of cabinets dividing kitchen/dining room). New cabinet doors were glass instead of solid wood to allow light to spread. Lots of glasses in the top cabinetry. Until one night they woke up to a horrific crash. Somehow, this upper cabinet had stood in place for over 40 years despite the fact that the builders had failed to install 3/4 of the anchor screws. They did get it fixed, but the amount of broken glass–between the cabinet doors and the glassware inside the cabinets–was horrible. It took at least 5 years before teeny tiny little glass bits stopped showing up.

        2. H3llifIknow*

          Our over the stove vent. Discovered the vent and the vent hole didn’t line up when we remodeled our kitchen. Years of steam and grease inside the walls. Thankfully we took it down to the studs so it got cleaned up and fixed, but I was so mad. I TOLD the builder, “I don’t think the vent is right; the smoke alarm constantly goes off,” and I was right!!

        3. Samwise*

          Haha we bought our house from a couple where the husband thought he was quite the handyman. We refer to him as the Unhandyman. For the first three years we found something half assed at least once a month (quarter round molding cut too long so it angled up at the corner, creative wiring, doors hung off-true, shelving with bracing with half the screws missing, gas stove with a propane fitting on one of the burners, downspouts that didn’t go all the way down…).

          1. KC*

            Ha! Same! We’ve lived in our house for not quite 4 years and have already had 4 crusty old experts (a plumber, an electrician, a carpenter and chimney sweep) say “Wow I have never seen anything like this before” –and two who were like “I cant believe your house hasn’t burned down yet.” Nothing like living in a death trap! I like Unhandyman… we’ve always called ours the “Mark’s Special” after the original culprit.

    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!

    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.”

    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…

      1. A perfectly normal-size space bird*

        I learned this the hard way when I designed my garden. I’m just glad none of the people at the lumber yard were around to see my half afternoon of panic when I realized a 2×4 does not mean what it sounds like.

    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”.

  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.

    1. Jess*

      I had one of these types at a private college rope me in. I was so starry eyed thinking little townie me got accepted to prestigious college, turns out after my first semester of the expensive but not transferrable “Live, Love Laugh” class (not its real name but similar trope) they no longer offered the degree track I signed up for! That shit wrecked my financial aid for a minute after i went back to Average Community College to finish my degree.

    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.

      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.

        1. Slow Gin Lizz*

          Ironically, my dad is often very illogical with regards to other areas of life, but when it comes to engineering and engineering-adjacent things, he’s spot-on.

  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!

  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.

        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.

    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.

      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.

    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.

      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.

          1. Not a Vorpatril*

            My kids are in elementary which starts (and ends) roughly 2 hours after the high school I teach at. Pretty normal around here, with middle schools going on in the hour in between. Those hour gaps are to allow for bussing students, for the record, as both high schools, both middle schools, and all… 6(?) elementary schools use the same buses/drivers.

              1. Seeking Second Childhood*

                My experience in the US is that school buses are used for kids too young to take public transit — and for kids in areas that do not have public transit.

                My sister took her child on the subway to elementary school; by middle school the schoolkids did it on their own.
                My family had no such option; we didn’t even have a bus across our suburb.

              2. Not a Vorpatril*

                Yes. Public schools have to provide transportation to and from the school, since otherwise some kids would not be able to, which is against the law. And since public transportation in most US cities is effectively non-existent, particularly in levels needed to get several thousand students to their various schools (my high school serves around 2300 students, which is fairly average here) that means school buses for all!

              3. TK*

                Where are you from (assuming you’re in the US) that public high schools don’t have busses? I thought it was basically the law everywhere that public schools had to provide transportation for students.

                1. New Jack Karyn*

                  A lot of times, in cities, they don’t run buses for high school students. They’re expected to get themselves to school. Some places will pay for public transit monthly passes for students.

                2. S*

                  I live in a large East Coast city, and the only school bus service is for kids with disabilities. Otherwise, you get the kids to school yourself. To be fair, our public transport is good and kids don’t have to pay for it. But elementary-aged kids need to be accompanied by parents when riding public transit, so it’s still a chunk of your day and money from your wallet.

            2. TK*

              While I can see how it makes sense with the busses, I’ve never heard of a setup like that. I guess your district is in the gap between not being able to afford separate busses but having multiple school campuses not in the same place.

              Logistically, what is the setup like? What times are we talking? Is it like high school is 7 to 2, middle school 8 to 3, elementary 9 to 4? What a mess for parents with kids at different grade levels.

              1. Lenora Rose*

                It’s also messed up in another way, based on the natural sleep schedules of different ages. Elementary school students tend to start with more early energy and wear out later in the day, and teens tend to naturally sleep later than either preteens or adults, so it SHOULD be the teens who have the latest start time.

                I believe in most places, kids over 12 are assumed to be able to transport themselves and stay home alone safely for a few hours (eg, after school but before parent comes home from a day job) so it was likely decided based on reducing the number of hours that younger kids will need after-school care.

    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.

      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!

  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…

    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.

        1. RC*

          Oh it is A Thing that maaaany scientists are extremely bad at poster design.

          Like of course there’s the “blocks of text, tl;dr, figures too small to read the axes” people, but I’ve seen worse than that too.

          To my mind this comes down to science communication more than art though, cause we all are just using PPT and whatnot anyway.

      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.

    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.

      1. Double A*

        In general it’s a best practice and more accessibly to provide students a variety of modalities to demonstrate their learning. The pinnacle of this is to provide multiple options for a given assignment, so for example you could design a poster OR write and essay OR do a podcast etc.

        Because you know there are, for example, extremely artistic students who struggle mightily with writing who think, “Why do I have to write this out for you when I could draw it and show it much more clearly?”

      2. TheOtherLaura*

        I never got why everyone seemed to think that every kid and teen is just naturally talented at and enthusiastic about drawing and painting.

        In school I occasionally asked if I could instead write poetry or compose music on the topic, but no teacher ever took me up on it.

        1. TheOtherLaura*

          To add the “weaponised incompetence” part: As my grades were down the drain anyway, I decided to play to my strength and make the most outrageously horrible drawings the school had ever seen.

    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.

      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….

        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.

    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.

    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.

      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????

    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.

    9. Zona the Great*

      Man. I was a very feisty child and in HS we had one of these teachers who made us just color maps of Africa. I was pissed and fed up with not getting an education that I finally cussed out loud and when he asked me why I told him he has taught us nothing except that Cameroon was pink. Pink? he asked….yes, I colored my map of Cameroon pink. So that’s what I learned. I was suspended.

      1. StarTrek Nutcase*

        Even my controlling authoritative parents would have given me a pass for that suspension. Next day, my mom would have been at the school raising heII. ((People thought my huge dad was tough, but quickly learned to never mess with my “bless your heart” petite mom.)

    10. Maple Librarian*

      that reminds me of an art class I had in jr high. I went to a private school and we had to take art and drama in grades 7 and 8. I’ve never been a great artist. Back then I was a bad artist, hated the class, hated the teacher, and was a 12 year old autistic girl who was Being bullied and who had no self esteem etc. So I didn’t care much. One assignment was to draw an outdoor scene and show shading. My scene was an alien planet that had built everything underground because the surface had no shelter, no rocks, nothing but desert. and several hot suns. Therefore no shading required. Teacher wasn’t impressed but i somehow managed to pass……

    11. Generic Name*

      Interestingly, your first attempt at drawing an ugly=unpalatable animal was pretty close to an evolutionary adaptation where animals that are poisonous (e.g. monarch butterflies) evolve garish colors and patterns to warn predators from eating them. Then other animals (e.g. viceroy butterfly) evolves to mimic the garish patterns of the poisonous animal while not being poisonous themselves.

    12. Meliciously_Compliant*

      My son is brilliant. Not like smart, but like Sheldonesque brilliant. But he hates art of any kind. Just has no use for it. He took 5 years of Spanish and was pretty fluent. His senior year the Spanish teacher wanted them to do an end of year project: basically make a memory book of pictures of the year (photos, drawn, cut outs from magazines, etc…) and write narratives about all of them and how they related to his senior year. He refused. She called me and said, “He’ll flunk the class even though he’s my top student! This is 50% of the grade! “(which was stupid IMHO). I asked him and he said, “I am taking a Spanish class, not an art class and I refuse to do an art project.” He also happened to be the Nationally ranked President of the Debate Team (which was to be frank EXHAUSTING as his Mother). He eventually wore her down and didn’t have to do the art piece of the project. Just basically wrote an essay about his year, which he was, willing if not happy to do.

  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.

    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.

      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.

  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.

    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.

      1. MigraineMonth*

        Speaking of impossible achievements, who remembers the No Child Left Behind Act? It made standardized testing central to evaluating school performance, and designated any schools that didn’t show improvement in the test scores every year as a “failing school”.

        My high school was designated as a “failing school” despite being one of the top two public schools in the state. Why? Because it was mathematically impossible to show “improvement every year” when you started in the 99th percentile.

          1. MigraineMonth*

            You are correct. Mathematically, we could have. With the rounding they did, it was only *technically* impossible.

        3. Zippity Doodah*

          gotta love when a tool is implemented by people who don’t know how it works. Ceiling effects (and floor effects) are like day 1 material for test design, especially for change scores.

  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.

  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.

    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???

      1. Grandma*

        Some guy who’s going for see-through (oo, oo, titties!) and can then mandate bra style, i.e. a perv.

        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.

      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.

      3. ThankGodI'mOutofRetail*

        ToysRUs changed the dress code from khaki pants to black pants, effective immediately, of course like two weeks after I bought two pairs of new pants, because some corporate idiot somewhere decided that they liked black better? Not easy to do on $8.10 an hour.

    4. StoneBear*

      Very nicely done! And go you for Figuring It Out, and also for having ragequat that shitty job! (sign me, Also Having Figured It Out, Eventually)

  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.

  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

    1. Alucius*

      And no one noticed that his itinerary was going to make him literally miss the boat? That’s hilarious.

      1. Cinn*

        I mean I used to work somewhere where the big bosses insisted on someone booking a flight that they were told – more than once – would get the person there too late for the demo they were being sent to help with. So, yeah…

        1. Rainy*

          I work in higher ed and when I started at my previous institution, the finance person in our department would do her own research on everyone’s flights for business travel and try to make people change to the cheapest flight or charge them the overage. She also once tried to reject someone’s upgrade for a 17hr flight because “it’s not that long, I’ve made flights that long in economy no problem.” Yeah, and you’re also 5’1″ and he’s 6’3″. Don’t get me started on how she went over our conference itineraries and refused to reimburse for meals if she judged that there was a provided meal. No, the “light refreshments” at the opening cocktail hour are not a dinner! I had two cubes of cheese and six grapes. That is not a meal!

    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.

    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.

      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…

      2. EvilQueenRegina*

        My grandad had some book about Scotland with an anecdote about a man from Shetland who was getting called up for WWII and was asked for his nearest airport. He answered (technically correctly) Bergen, Norway.

    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.

    6. perstreperous*

      This is rather like the situation in the UK where train tickets are frequently cheaper if split (i.e. if going from A to B, you buy two tickets, A to C then C to B, where C is on the same route between A and B; even if the train doesn’t stop at C the ticket pair is valid).

      (Train ticketing and pricing in the UK is so arcane and obtuse that only three people understand it and two of them are dead).

      There are dedicated websites and apps which work out the cheapest splits and sell the tickets, but corporate travel doesn’t have a clue and either buys the A to B ticket (if it buys the ticket for you) or cribs and moans endlessly about “non-standard ticketing” (if you buy the ticket).

  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.

    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.

      1. Rainy*

        I worked at Pier 1 as a team lead for a couple of months while job hunting, and the policy in my region was that, rather than taking people off the schedule immediately, they’d schedule you for one last shift on the day after your notice period ended so that when you didn’t show up for the shift that was scheduled for after your employment ended, they could mark you NC/NS and ineligible for rehire, just to burn your reference.

        When I realized what was happening, I did my best to make sure I was seeing the schedule before it was printed when someone was due to leave so I could prevent it, and I also warned all of my associates that it would happen and to check or have someone else check the schedule (which was only posted in paper, never online) the morning of the day after their last shift just in case.

        It was an absolutely wretched place to work, frankly. Our regional manager was a monster.

        1. Ansteve*

          And here is why so many companies now just confirm employment when doing reference checks. A scorned employee could sue for slander/libel if they were bored enough for an NC/NS reference for a shift after a written two weeks was up.

        2. ThankGodI'mOutofRetail*

          When I was at PartyCity they were always harping about overtime hours, (which would help if they hired, you know, people) and there were several occasions where the District Manager ordered the Store Manager to “fix it” when we were over our allotment of overtime, which was accomplished by deleting our worked hours and replacing them with hours from our PTO pool. (Which by the way is super illegal, and yes the District Manager knew this is how the Store Manager was “fixing it”, he told him to do it and saw the before and after timesheets.) At the time I was not paying close enough attention to my electronic paystubs that you had to go look up, and by the time I noticed and found a new job, the six month deadline from the first occurrence had passed and I could not report it in my state. Expensive lesson learned.

          1. Rainy*

            Holy cow, I would be so mad! I hope that store manager steps on a Lego daily for the rest of their life.

            Our big scheduling issue at that store was that the store manager didn’t want to give anyone a reliable schedule or enough hours that they’d get benefits, so all my associates had other jobs, sometimes multiple, as well as being college students (most of them anyway), and their Pier 1 shifts were very much last on the list of their priorities because they usually got no more than 16 hours/week with a really variable schedule, so they prioritized the jobs that didn’t yank them around.

            The store manager was definitely hampered by the absolute monster of a district manager, but store morale was also pretty bad not just for obvious reasons but also because the assistant store manager was both a terrible human and very dumb, and she was only ASM because she sabotaged a more qualified person. And that was just the professional drama. Her personal life was more drama than life, which we knew ALL about, because she took phone calls on the sales floor nonstop.

      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.

        1. Cynthia Simpson*

          I worked for a Navy commissary that had a large Asian clientele, so we sold 25- and 50-pound bags of rice and a great deal of Asian food that other commissaries didn’t sell. At least the people in the Navy commissary hierarchy had the sense to consider that not all Navy commissaries had the same type of clientele. We would have lost customers if we changed to the type of merchandise that was sold at, say, a military base in Texas, or if the base in Texas tried to sell the type of merchandise we sold. My co-workers were also mostly Asian, and our potlucks were a feast for the senses.

    5. Code Monkey, the SQL*

      I got saddled with that same experience of “working for the great manager until they transfer and we get the demoted one.”

      I sadly do not have any malicious compliance stories relating to Vicki, because I was too much of a mouse at the time to do so, but I forever hold the peak of bad management to be her strategy of passive-aggressive sticky notes from the point of view of the thermometer and bag of onions. “I belong in the drawer under the prep table, please do not leave me anywhere else! -Thermometer”
      “Put me in the side room, I do not want to get stepped on! -Onions”

      Still makes me bare my teeth

      1. LBD*

        “Please stop leaving me notes from non-sentient, inanimate objects without opposable thumbs! – Non-Preschooler Employee”

    6. MigraineMonth*

      I once worked at a tiny store with a very incompetent and hands-off boss who generally only staffed one person to the store. I left her a message reminding her about a big street fest that weekend and that she might want to think about having a sale and more salespeople on shift.

      When I went to street fest, I walked past the store and realized immediately that she had put everything on 50% sale but still only had one salesperson. I ended up giving my boyfriend an excuse and helping out for an hour (which I absolutely put on my time card) just so the poor other salesperson could escape for a lunch break.

    7. linger*

      they transferred her to a different store when the entire staff walked out.

      I feel there’s a whole other story there. Why did the entire staff walk out on the “great” store manager? Or was the walkout in reaction to her being transferred?

      1. Rainy*

        I read it as the other store walking out and them transferring the great manager to that store to build it back up.

        1. Peanut Hamper*

          Yep, this was the sequence of events. “When the entire staff at that other store walked out” is what I should have said.

          Kathy was an absolutely great manager. I was very young (19) and she was a couple of years out of college with her business degree. She was so amazing and taught me stuff that I still use to this day. She’s one of the three best managers I’ve ever had.

  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.

  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.

    2. allathian*

      I doubt the drivers cared what they were transporting and carrying as long as they were paid…

    3. Adriano*

      Eh. Drivers may have been bored, but in the end they were doing their job. Your act, on the other hand, impacted the ability of that company to respond to actual valid requests, which is fully in the spirit of this thread’s request.

      I approve of that, by the way, I’m not criticizing you.

  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

    1. TSA compliant*

      Some day I’m going to wear a hoodie on a flight with nothing underneath but a sports bra.

  31. Harper*

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

    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.

      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.

    1. Goldenrod*

      Ahhh, thank you for posting that clip!

      When that first aired on Mad Men, I just could not… stop… laughing. The delivery, the facial expressions, everything, OMG.

  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.

    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.

      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.

  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.

    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.

      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.

      2. MigraineMonth*

        I really like hummus sandwiches, with crisp veggies and extra olive oil.

        Soggy hummus wraps, though, are the work of the devil.

        1. RC*

          The devil decreed that when the standard option is meat, cheese, and veg sandwiches, the vegetarian option is a cold soggy wrap of hummus and sadness. Always wrap, never bread, always soggy!!!

          There is one smashed chickpea (it’s not really hummus, but the chickpeas are somewhat broken up) sandwich at a place near us, and it is really quite good.

      3. Lenora Rose*

        A hummus sandwich that is just hummus — especially the sort of hummus you get from a place that thinks garlic should be added minimally and with caution — would indeed be sadness.

        Yet proper hummus is an excellent ingredient to be used lavishly in a sandwich/wrap if included along along with veggies, or falafel, or donair, or…

    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. :)

  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.

    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.

      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.

        1. Sunshine State*

          Wonder if you worked with a friend of mine who worked in womenswear at a department store. She would get calls meant for another department and loathed transferring calls (this was the late 1980’s… corded phones!) so she would cheerfully tell the caller that if they got disconnected to call back and ask for the department they were calling for and promptly hung up on them. She assumed they would think they were disconnected and call back as instructed. She won Employee of the Month numerous times without management knowing about her transferring calls technique!

          1. run mad; don't faint*

            I did that too! Mostly because transferring calls was a pain and I couldn’t guarantee it would go through anyway. I was in good standing with my boss, so I don’t think anyone there ever figured out I was doing it either.

      2. learnedthehardway*

        Absolutely. I remember ringing up a grocery company’s head office for some work I was doing, and getting a bizarrely manic greeting sung out to me as follows – “Hello, this is GroceryCo! We’re FRESH OBSESSED!! How can I help YOU today?!??!”

        I just started laughing. Probably something you just had to be there for, but it was so weird.

        1. RetiredAcademicLibrarian*

          There’s a coffee kiosk named Scoots – corporate mandates that employees on the drive-thru must say “Scoot on over” after each order. I bet the employees say that in their sleep after a few days.

            1. run mad; don't faint*

              I drove through McDonald’s yesterday and the cashier rattled off something lengthy, rhythmic and mostly unintelligible. Spoken very quickly for which I don’t blame them. I felt very bad that they had to get out whatever the spiel was every time they took an order.

            2. Rob aka Mediancat*

              Most of the time I hear that I hear it being read out in a rushed monotone: “Welcome-to-Burger-King-where-you-rule-how-may-I-help-you?” Since they probably have to say it 20 kajillion times a day, I can hardly fault them for it.

          2. Teapot Connoisseuse*

            My husband and I once went to an okonomiyaki pancake place in Japan where the employees had to say “pon-poko-pon” (an onomatopoeic expression of a tanuki using its tummy as a drum) after confirming and delivering each order. We were in stitches, and still say it to each other on the odd occasion we make okonomiyaki at home.

    3. LizB*

      “(and had recently gotten a medical accommodation they weren’t fans of)” Why hello there, ADA discrimination that is maybe impossible to prove but nonetheless sucks for the victim!

      1. Elsewise*

        Oh yeah. She was very young, just out of college, and I got the impression she didn’t have a lot of support from folks who understood office workplace norms. She asked me if she’d get fired for asking for an accommodation, and I had to tell her that was illegal. I think if she’d been older and more confident and if they thought she’d sue for discrimination they’d have been more careful, but they recognized that they could take advantage of her.

  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.

    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.

  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.

    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.

        1. Sevenrider*

          I can always pick out the outside counsel when they are visiting, they are the only ones wearing suits.

  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.

    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.

      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.” >.<

  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.

    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

      1. Ginger Cat Lady*

        To be fair, men like this don’t get the message unless you are crystal clear. I do not think her wording was rude. It was blunt and clear. The ridiculous development plan and the little tantrum when it became clear she wouldn’t be subservient to him the way he wanted proves that HE was the unprofessional one. And he is also the one who was forced out.
        Men do not get to assume the role of “mentor” and the power dynamics that go with it without consent. And women get to be direct and clear without men calling it “rude”

        3. ProfessionalismPaper*

          thank you. this was the exact dynamic he was enforcing – that everyone was subservient to him. it was gross and assuming someone wants your mentorship is extremely unprofessional.

        4. StarTrek Nutcase*

          Agreed, except I’d add “women” also do not get to assume the role of mentor and the power dynamics that go with it without consent. As a woman, in my work history, more women have tried than men. Best case, they thought it was a woman helping other women, but regardless I had real issues withe the assumption combined with lack of consent.

      2. I Have RBF*

        “You’re right, we are struggling to communicate and we should take this discussion to HR for some clarity” is not rude. At all. It’s just not obsequious and subservient.

        1. StarTrek Nutcase*

          Unfortunately, many of older women were taught direct = rude (impolite). We’ve had to learn that was incorrect and be willing to be thought abrasive or mean unlike a man saying similar in words & tone. There’s a risk, but also freedom in refusing to bend to ridiculous societal or cultural roles.

  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?

    2. Roy G. Biv*

      I have forgotten many things in life, but I have never forgotten my piece of cheese in a book!

      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.

        1. Blue Spoon*

          Slim Jim is pretty nasty, but I’m not sure if it tops partially eaten McDonald’s hashbrown, still in the wrapper.

          1. Ev*

            I will see your hashbrown and raise you an open, slightly used bandaid.

            That book was discarded with a quickness, I can assure you.

            1. AnReAr*

              I once checked out a book that was contaminated on many pages with what I’m fairly certain was fudge due to the consistency and my need to believe so. Only starting nearly halfway in, and I was well into a vacation and the story when I found that. The head librarian at the time was the kind the nasty stereotypes were about so I never notified anybody and dropped it off in the outside bin.

          2. Sharpie*

            I can top that! My aunt used to work in a library and got a book returned with a rasher of bacon as a bookmark. I don’t know whether this was raw or cooked, however.

      2. K*

        On a less revolting note my sister once used a $20 as a bookmark and forgot to remove it before returning it. I do hope it provided a nice surprise to a shelver

        1. Rob aka Mediancat*

          I once used my uncashed paycheck as a bookmark and forgot to remove before returning. Fortunately, no one else cashed it either and I Was able to retrieve it from the shelves a couple of days later.

      3. yes librarians get masters degrees*

        When I worked in the public library one of my patrons returned a book with a fried egg being used as a bookmark. Fun times.

    4. Alianne*

      Former page, represent! My messiest day was when someone returned a book with a…recently used…popsicle stick as a bookmark.

      1. MigraineMonth*

        I worked in a library when DVDs were still pretty new to the collection. We even had an insert in every DVD case explaining how to handle it and what to do if it didn’t work. One of my jobs was to open every returned DVD case, check that the DVD was included and then clean the DVD. The dusty, smudged or sticky (eww) DVD. I have no idea how patrons got them so gross in a one-week checkout period.

    5. Dhaskoi*

      Never any food bookmarks when I volunteered as a shelver, but more than one patron whow as comfortable returning books extensively annotated with their own notes, criticisms and revision.

      (Including one who wrote their review of the book, in pen, on the title page)

    6. Youth Librarian*

      I’ve always told my aides/pages they don’t get paid enough to clean up vomit or plunge the toilet. Usually our director or one of us managers does it.

  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.

    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.

      1. MissMaple*

        Ha, I’m totally going to give myself away, but yeah, Swales – ATK – Orbital ATK – Northrop Grumman. Stickers and branding everywhere!

    3. Alton Brown's Evil Twin*

      Nice.

      Beltway Bandit branding is just as weird in some ways as those ridiculous pharmaceutical names.

    4. Bunch Harmon*

      I assisted with a few charity events that were sponsored by a big bank. They had recently *slightly* changed their name, and we got in some trouble because we used the old name. At the event, they handed out all of their old swag with the old name on it. My boss was furious.

  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.

    1. Silver Robin*

      eeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

      well done; one of the things I like about how I dress is that skirts and cozy tops are *comfy* and also, nobody can ever complain that the style is unsuitable. I get this boosted aura of respectability (which is utter bs), and I get to use it to make pointed comments about other people’s opinions.

      1. I got your "conservative" right here, buddy*

        Yes! I only stopped wearing them once I started on the chemistry classes (nail polish also went by the wayside).
        One of the tennis instructors joked that he wouldn’t be able to swear in a court of law that I had ankles.

  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.

    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.

  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.

    1. ferrina*

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

    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!

  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.

    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.

      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.

      3. Lizy*

        Late to the party and not me but my husband but I’ll bite.
        Husband’s previous generation grew up essentially bi-lingual – English and French creole. They taught Husband but nothing formal, so no writing or reading stuff. No one in the family went around bragging about it, so people didn’t necessarily know they all were basically fluent in spoken French.
        High school required a foreign language, and no amount of persuasion would change their mind. So Husband took French. Spent a few weeks slacking off and not really doing anything until he turned in or said something and the teacher said it was wrong. He said no, it’s right. She said it’s wrong. So he starts explaining to her why what he did/said was correct, and why she was wrong. In perfect French.
        Husband did not have to complete the semester of foreign language as that requirement was deemed to have been met.

    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.)

    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

    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!!

      1. Bookworm*

        I’m so very sorry about the horrible guidance counselor and what sounds like a horrible high school.

        1. darsynia*

          Thank you, it kind of was. A couple of different documentaries have been made about how rough the city itself is (mostly because of the number of pro NFL players that came from here).

          All the money went to the football team, and honestly it has paid off RIDICULOUSLY well for *them* but not for anyone interested in academics. We’re the only high school in the country with 3 pro bowl hall of famers. They expanded the school to be grades 7-12 and it still only has about 400 students, but our football program is so good we’re in the 4A designation even though that’s for schools with much higher populations.

          As always, the trade-off is where the money is. (yes this is somewhat doxing myself but I’ve spoken in public online spaces about it before so no worries)

      2. And thanks for the coffee*

        I’m so sorry. I can’t think of anything that would describe what an awful human that person was (and probably still is, if alive). I hope others gave you the kind of support you needed.

    5. Lady Ann*

      There really does seem to be a thing about 10th grade English teachers! I remember mine projecting writing samples taken from papers we had just turned in, one as an example of “good” writing and one as an example of “bad” writing. The students’ names were removed, but we all knew the subjects of each others’ papers so we all knew who wrote the papers she was using as samples. She decided to choose mine as a sample of bad writing. I was a good student and a decent writer (for a 10th grader) and I honestly just think she wanted to take me down a peg. My friend’s was chosen as the good writing sample, and God bless her, once she saw the way the teacher was tearing me down, she promptly spoke up and informed the teacher that her supposedly “good” writing sample was the same essay she had turned in for a different assignment in 9th grade and she had gotten a solid C on it. I don’t even know if it was true, but I loved my friend in that moment.

    6. HB*

      My mother did this once! Though she admitted that she was and her classmates were being absolute brats.

      It was a history class in an all girls high school and the normal teacher was out, so they had a substitute. Cue a bunch of bored, teenaged girls deciding they wanted to mess with her and one by one they got up and went into some weird alcove in the back of the room where they were no longer in view of the teacher. At some point the teacher had had enough, stormed over to them, pointed to my mother and told her to repeat back everything she’d said.

      My mother has a freakishly good memory and so… she did. When she finished the teacher just turned around and went back up to the board, completely defeated.

    7. 3-Foot Tall Inflatable Rainbow Unicorn*

      It was a college teacher for me, and she was All About The Hero’s Journey. Any time any character moved more than a foot, it was a Hero’s Journey. Had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night? Hero’s Journey.

      At one point in the class we had to write 5 page paper of what Odysseus learned on his hero’s journey. And I was so *annoyed* at her attitude that my thesis was “he learned nothing; his personality remained exactly the same” and backed it up with lavish quotes directly from the text.

      She hated me but she couldn’t flunk me; I’d defended my point too well.

    8. fka Get Me Out of Here*

      This comment thread of cruddy teachers reminded me of the one time I got detention in high school. I was finished early in the computer lab, I was doing something else and talking to someone who was also done, and the teacher, who didn’t like me because I was already good at computers (I wasn’t rude about it, I just finished everything quickly), noticed that 2.5″ of my shirt was untucked and gave me 2 hours of after-school detention. Because of transportation or whatever, it was to be served the next day, so that day I brought my laptop along and while in detention, I started to play The Sims while the stoner guys behind me watched and giggled. The coach supervising detention (who happened to be my history teacher and who liked me) noticed the giggling and asked what I was doing – this was pre-internet – so I told him I was writing an essay. He didn’t press and I played the Sims for the next two hours. It was basically the opposite of punishment for me.

    9. The Cosmic Avenger*

      This reminded me of a story that was more….a request for malicious compliance?

      Being a nerd who thought he was cool, in my intro to calculus class I sat in the back, as I tended to do. There were filing cabinets in the back, so I’d lean my chair back against them sometimes. Now this math teacher, who was generally funny and well-liked, started out our class every day by writing 8-10 problems on the board, which took him a while, so by the time he was partway through writing #2, I had solved #1. (Remember, intro class, these were very basic problems.) I kept going like that, and solved them all while he was writing. By the last one, I’d have it solved while he turned around and talked to us. So, seeing me sitting there, leaning back, nothing on my desk, he’d call on me, and I’d give him the answer. After realizing he wasn’t going to catch me out, he stopped calling on me for a while, but one day he called on me again, and one by one asked me to answer more than half of them. After realizing I really did know the answer to all of them, he said in a mock exasperated voice, “[Cosmic Avenger], can you at least just take out a notebook, sit up at your desk, and act like you’re working on these?”

      And so I did so for the rest of the year….but I still didn’t write anything down. :D

    10. Lenora Rose*

      After the number of other people saying 10th grade English, I thought, “I always like English…” then I remembered THAT was the teacher who did the rudest thing to me any teacher ever did.

      Our school division had a little anthology they collected of stories and art by students, sorted by age/grade categories. I was already known as someone who wrote fiction and drew a whole lot, and I’d had things in it in other grades, and would again in grade 12 – but always I’d had teachers say “This is good” and ask if I wanted them to submit it.

      I’d handed in an assignment that was a cartoon of three students in exactly matching punkish outfits with a snarky quote (attributed) from an author about people who were so determined not to conform to the norm that they looked alike.

      It was a pencil drawing, so of course it wouldn’t show well in a print book. And I didn’t think it was that great, it had been a quick cartoon. But apparently she liked it.

      So she TRACED OVER IT with a marker (ie, BADLY), and submitted it without asking me if I wanted it to go in, or mentioning to me she had done so. I found out when I found the inevitable rejection in my class file weeks later. I looked at the hash she’d made of my art and was livid twice over, first that she’d ruined my art without asking, then that she’d essentially shown it to a bunch of people as an example of supposed excellence in that state while still attributing it to me.

      For the record, I could use a nib pen and India Ink, never mind any other kind of halfway decent regular ballpoint pen for art, I just didn’t bother for a quick one-off assignment.

      1. StarTrek Nutcase*

        My 11th grade French teacher (L) has lived in my memory for 50+ yrs. She was youngish & attractive, and had an absolute love of calling out dress code violations of the girls (think skirt 1″ too short). Boys’ violations wre ignored. I was had violations, but was irked my GFs did. I eventually got elected editor of the school’s monthly student newsletter which
        meant I wrote an editorial. Our advisor was a
        real believer in free speech. So the day, L wore a see-thru blouse which through her lacy bra showed, I had my next editorial topic. I called out the hypocrisy of teachers dressing like that yet citing even minor student infractions & only citing girls. Though I didn’t name her, students & teachers alike knew it was L from my description of what she wore. Surprisingly, it was published and I got zero pushback (prob. school politics).

        Fun fact: 15 yrs later at a dept. holiday party where we’re all exchanging h.s. memories, AFTER my turn, I look up and see L across the room. Turns out she was married to a professor I worked with. She didn’t hear, but her husband did (I did give her maiden name). Kudos to him, he never blinked or gave me a hard time.

  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.

    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.

  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.

    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.

  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….”

  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.

    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!

      1. my cat is prettier than me*

        My grandmother used to work at a shop that offered gift wrapping. One day, this guy came in and was being a huge jerk, berating her, stuff like that. He had two gifts he needed wrapped: One for his wife, and one for his mistress. He left while she was wrapping.

        She swapped the gifts so the wife would get what was meant for the mistress, and vice versa. From what I know, there was never any fallout. It’s my favorite story about her.

          1. The Cosmic Avenger*

            I am now fantasizing that 1) the wife and mistress were markedly different sizes (in any way), and 2) the gifts were very racy lingerie and a vacuum.

    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.

      1. my cat is prettier than me*

        I worked at a stationary store that offered gift wrapping. They had a Very Specific Method that I still use today. I was pretty bad at it when I worked there, but over the years I’ve gotten better! I’m a gift wrap snob now though lol.

    3. MigraineMonth*

      I used to work at a tiny toy store that the owner seemed to have given up on actually making any money, so just stopped spending money on. We were always understaffed (only 1 person unless it was December), the barcode scanner didn’t work, the credit card scanner didn’t work, the cash register didn’t lock… checking someone out was a serious time investment, even when they didn’t request gift wrap. If they did, and there was anyone else in line to check out, I used to beg them to come back in 15 minutes so I wasn’t flailing with the scotch tape with everyone watching and waiting.

    4. allathian*

      As a college student I worked at a bookstore. I can wrap books so that the package looks nice, but not much else.

    5. Sarah With an H*

      Oh gosh. This has nothing to do with malicious compliance but it reminds me of a time in high school a friend and I volunteered to do gift wrapping at the mall before the holidays (it was to raise money for something, don’t remember what). There was a wholesale bakery we’d found that we’d buy bread rolls from super cheap, at wholesale prices, even though obviously they weren’t really set up for that. But the owner was super nice. So when she asked if we would be interested in volunteering we figured we it’s the least we could do. We were imagining something casual that offered free gift-wrapping with a donations bucket. Instead it was this super legit stall that charged $8+ per gift (in early 2000s money). Neither of us was terribly good at wrapping gifts, which we didn’t think would be a big deal if we were doing it for free, but if someone was paying $8 it should look good. Trying to do that with customers staring at us was sooo stressful.
      Even better, we had signed in with our names and affiliation (we put the bakery), and at some point we overheard one of the women in charge ask someone else “What is the XX Bakery?” They had no idea. So we didn’t even get our brownie points!

    6. Mike S*

      In college, I worked at a local department store chain one summer. I had to fill in for the gift wrapping person while they were on vacation, and did a decent job of it. I still do the wrapping for my family now, 30 years later.

  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.

    2. JanetM*

      Many years ago, my then-manager sent a fax from the office. It was flagged as personal, and she was instructed to reimburse the Business Office for $0.36.

      They wouldn’t accept coins; she had to write a check. Which I’m fairly certain cost significantly more than $0.36 to process.

    3. bishbah*

      Why be malicious about something so ordinary? Long-distance calling could get expensive fast, so it’s not strange that they’d monitor usage and want reimbursement for personal calls. I doubt you were singled out.

      1. All The Tired Horses*

        The company could just cover the first call if it was relatively cheap, and let the employee know that next time they would be on the hook.

    4. Zyzzx*

      This reminds me of the time there was some sort of snafu with financial aid at my college, and a bunch of students ended up with a tuition due balance of like $0.62 and got all sorts of (automatically generated) threats that they were going to be unenrolled, etc. etc.

      My friend paid that in pennies too.

      1. A perfectly normal-size space bird*

        At OldJob, I handled most of our office’s local banking. We switched to a new bank not long after I started and I handled the close out at our old credit union. I thought everything went smoothly.

        A year later, the credit union sent us a letter saying our account was in the negative by 57 cents and if we didn’t fix this, they would send it to collections. Boss said it was easier to give them a few coins than fight it. So I went to make a 43 cent deposit to bring it to zero and close the account, but they refused because they can’t take deposits for commercial accounts for less than $20. I wrote a check for $20.43 from our current bank but they wouldn’t accept a check from us because our account had been in the negative for so long.

        So with some help from a lovely teller at our current bank, I returned with 2,043 pennies in a jar, waited until they counted every single one, then tried to close the account. They refused to close the account because they had to wait for cash deposits to clear the next day (one of many reasons we ditched that credit union).

        So the next day, I came back and requested to close out the account and withdraw the remaining balance. They gave me back the box of 2,000 pennies.

        It might have ended there, but they failed to account for the levels of spite my boss felt by then. My boss had a personal account at the credit union, so after I returned with the box, he put $20 in the petty cash fund, took the box back to the credit union, and made them deposit 2,000 pennies into his account.

    5. Jayne*

      For a while, my university was doing this, where you would have to pay for any personal calls before the advent of cellphones for everyone. I took a bit of delight in paying in coins, taking a photocopy of the bill with the coins and requiring a receipt from the manager that got the phone gig. Eventually they figured out that it was taking way more time than it was worth and everyone got a smartphone anyway. No more wasting photocopy costs.

    6. K*

      At the time of my dad’s birth (1946), my granddaddy had a job that involved emptying the town’s parking meters (which took nickels at that time). The doctor who delivered my dad was rude to my grandmother so my granddaddy paid the bill in person with 2 sacks of nickels. To this day an easy way to enrage my dad is to work the phrase “sack of nickels” into conversation.

  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.

    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.

      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.

        1. learnedthehardway*

          I love how his feedback was notable in its LACK of detail about what his concerns were, lol.

    2. The Formatting Queen*

      From the opposite side, I was writing the Work Instructions for our new EDMS platform, and one of my users complained that it was too long and we shouldn’t have any SOPs or WIs more than 10 pages long.* (The WI in question was around 65ish pages, covered several different processes, and included a TON of screenshots.) And why does she have to train to it anyway. No one’s expecting you to memorize it, lady. You just gotta know what’s in it so when you go to do the process you know where to reference back to it. Unsurprisingly, she has not once done any of the processes the correct way since we launched, while most other people have told me “your instructions are great and so easy to follow!”

      *She also once asked my help formatting a new SOP and essentially told me “we can get this down to 10 pages if you ignore the approved template, expand the margins and eliminate all this white space and maybe make the font smaller.” Did she want to remove any content? No, she did not. Just make it harder to read in the interest of getting below her arbitrary page limit. Heaven help me.

    3. An Australian in London*

      “Your request for more detail has insufficient detail. Please provide more (or really, any) detail about what you think needs more detail.”

  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.

  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.

    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.

      1. MyStars*

        If only the primary function of lab work was comedic value. Fellow short person, I feel you pain, as in the day(s) I forgot the chair was different and it slid backward, leaving me to land hard on the end of my spine.

  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?

  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.

    1. Slow Gin Lizz*

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

      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?

      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.

      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.

      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.

  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.

  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.

    1. Blue Spoon*

      Keyboards. It should be “stuck to the undersides of the keyboards” in the Teams message quote.

  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!

  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.

    1. Manual Focus Eyes*

      This reminds me of a time before I got glasses. My mom let me take a bunch of pictures at a family event. The camera was a manual focus film SLR. I didn’t know about the split prism focus dot at the time, so I focused visually by eye. All the pictures turned out slightly out of focus by the exact same amount. It turns out I was using the camera lens as glasses that day. I eventually got regular glasses.

  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.

    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.

  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.

  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.

    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.

  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.

    1. AFac*

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

      *Drinks in solidarity*

    2. Eddie Elgar*

      I did something similar with a syllabus several years ago, with the heading bolded and in all capitals: “AND NOW FOR THE COMPLETELY INSANE AMOUNT OF BOILERPLATE INFORMATION MANDATED BY THE UNIVERSITY, MOST OF WHICH YOU WILL NEVER READ WILLINGLY.”

      This part of the syllabus also had a section titled: “University Policy on Concealed Weapons (As Enacted by the State Legislature that Ranks Last in the Nation for the Number of Members with College Degrees).” I still haven’t quite figured out how Academic Affairs looked at me and decided I was Chair material.

  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.

    1. Jonathan MacKay*

      My night shifts always had me starting at 10 PM, so there were rarely hiccups like that…. but when Daylight Savings rolled around – it was horrible.

  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.

    1. Nina*

      Yeah, in that situation you escalate as far above Todd’s head as you can reasonably reach, and request clarification.

    2. Lenora Rose*

      There was a reason, I think the “Document absolutely whose decision this was, and display that documentation publicly” was a part of it, but it also seemed pretty clear the person doing this was in a headspace where they were willing to torch the job behind them if they had to.

  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.

  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.

    1. UncleFrank*

      I want to get Dave and the teal polo stud muffin together… sounds like it would be the beginning of a fun party!

  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.

    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.

        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.

  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.

  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.

  74. LaminarFlow*

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

  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.

  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.

    1. Dobby is a Free Elf!*

      I did something similar. In our school system, first grade was the year they really taught handwriting. I skipped first grade. Got to second and was regularly getting called out on my handwriting. At one point, I was informed that I was writing too big.

      So I proceeded to write in teeny tiny little letters that today, I would need reading glasses to decipher…for weeks.

    2. ex teach*

      Not to be that person, but the point of those lines is to teach/practice proportions of the letter shapes (which is not necessarily a given, even for otherwise neat and legible writing). So you were probably just reinforcing to your teacher that you needed that lined paper!

  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.

  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.

  79. Anon for this*

    I left my previous employer when my boss was replaced with a horrible person. This person (will call them Bully) was hired because they were special friends with the higher ups. Bully immediately began one by one targeting our very strong and cohesive team.

    After 5 team members quit after 6 months, and HR did nothing with the receipts that we provided, I gave notice of 2 weeks and 1 day (minimum notice was 2 weeks; industry standard is more like 4-6 weeks, but Bully was petty enough to try and keep my PTO payout, so I added that extra day, cause I’m pettier than they were). Bully then asked me to give a written overview of my projects.

    When I complied, Bully insisted it wasn’t enough detail and that oh- they would need my entire email inbox transferred over with all items detailed and categorized. Bully did not realize that I actually archive all emails because some projects I’d been on literally went back years (or decades) and we sometimes needed to refer back to really old items to see how something had progressed. I went to my archives, created a folder called “Very important” and added every mundane email I could find from a lab picnic invite from 15 years ago to random office orders that somehow also got saved. I also created multiple subfolders with cryptic codes like “PJR files” where everything was just vaguely related enough to each other to be grouped together. I probably put 2500 emails in there, and it was a glorious moment to know Bully had to sift through all those detailed files they wanted.

      1. Anon for this*

        Best part: I know for a fact that Bully didn’t actually want the emails for anything related to my projects. They wanted the emails to see if they could find anything that I might have reported to HR about them. So I created an HR file and filled it with announcements of promotions, celebrations, and 1-2 actual HR-related items just because.

  80. 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!

  81. BLA*

    I worked on a customer-facing team at an e-commerce marketplace. One of our responsibilities was to ensure that the reviews buyers left for sellers complied with our site policies.

    One seller was furious to have received a negative review (a fair and benign one imho). The seller repeatedly demanded that we delete the review, despite the review not violating a single policy. Finally the seller landed on a loophole; the review mentioned her first name, which was a part of her public seller name, and we did have a policy against “doxing” or otherwise sharing PII in reviews.

    I told her we could delete the negative review based on that policy as long as she was ok with me also deleting the two dozen or so positive reviews that also included her first name (my form of malicious compliance since I found the negative review to be fair). Doing so would significantly bring down her review count…but she called my bluff and agreed to those terms. In the end, I think she would have been better off just keeping the single negative review, but some people can’t handle anything less than a perfect rating.

    1. Southern Violet*

      Oh come on. In no way is a first name doxxing. Shoulda just told her no or told her review fixing was against TOS (it generally is) or found some reason to close her account entirely.

      1. BLA*

        I don’t disagree with the ridiculousness of the seller’s demand, but important context was that the site policy (which was written by someone far above me) cited a seller’s “legal name” as something that was prohibited from being included in reviews.

        I just checked the marketplace’s terms and they’ve changed the policy to “full name,” so thankfully this wouldn’t happen in 2025.

  82. Beveled Edge*

    I wish I had a good story from when the public library’s directors sent out a district-wide email dictating new closing procedures (that were clearly written without talking to employees who worked closing shifts or sticking around to observe closing), but since it was literally impossible to implement them, we kept doing things the way we always did. We knew there was zero chance any of the directors were going to stick around until 9pm to make sure we were following the new procedures. Which, again, were literally impossible to implement and completely disconnected from reality.

  83. Catgirl*

    A coworker who worked in a laboratory with dangerous chemicals had a manager who was constantly interrupting her with phone calls while she was working. An older colleague suggested this method for dealing with him. She started recording exactly how long it took when he called to stop her work to take the call: leaving her work in a state so she could walk away for a few minutes (for example turning off burners), taking off her safety gear (gloves, respirator, etc), washing to decontaminate herself, walking to the office, talking on the phone, repeating everything in reverse to resume work. When it was time to fill out her timesheet she tallied up all that time and it was a lot. She showed it to her manager and asked him what task she should charge it to. He stop calling so much.

  84. MasterOfBears*

    My job involves some pretty physical field work, so we have to go through annual physicals for insurance purposes. Kind of a hassle, but whatever. Except for a few years ago, when a new staff doctor took over administrating the physicals and approvals, and anyone with any kind of psychiatric prescription got phone calls asking extremely detailed, frankly invasive questions about their medication, medication history, symptoms, how well each medication treated your symptoms, your side effects, the list went on – and if you’ve ever been prescribed anti-depressants or anti-anxiety medications, you know that you usually have to try out quite a few to find the right fit. It became quite apparent that this person did not want to approve anyone on any of these medications for field work, which was about 70% of our job description.

    I got my call on a Friday afternoon, about 10 minutes before the end of a shift that started at 3:45 am. I was beyond over it. I was over EVERYTHING. I was so far over it I had broken through the atmosphere into a peaceful void of zen and mild heat exhaustion. The new doctor started out asking questions about my experience with Zoloft, which I had taken for 6 weeks over 20 years ago. I asked why that was relevant. She said it was important information to assess my fitness for field work, tell me about the side effects you experienced with Zoloft. I said “oh, well if it’s important information–” And then I became an unskippable cutscene.

    I experienced a lot of side effects with Zoloft. They were…gastrointestinal in nature, and I spent 40 minutes describing them in excruciating detail. I invoked all five senses and every colorful metaphor my sleep deprived brain could come up with. Every time she tried to break in, I just said “no no, I want you to have all the information you need! It’s important!” When I finally ran out of steam, she decided we didn’t need to discuss the rest of my medication history. I went home, slept for something like 11 hours, sent an email to HR asking for clarification on why the staff doctor was asking about my full medication history, which wasn’t in my employment physical paperwork, since I hadn’t signed any releases for the rest of my medical records, and went back to bed.

    On Monday, I was informed I was cleared for field work. It was a different doctor administering physicals the next year.

    1. Alton Brown's Evil Twin*

      There’s a lot of other graphic stuff you could get into as well. About different body parts.

      Nicely done.

    2. Hlao-roo*

      into a peaceful void of zen and mild heat exhaustion

      This is such a powerful, don’t-mess-with-me place! Excellent job being thorough with the Zoloft side effects!

      1. Strive to Excel*

        I like the Captain Awkward phrase of “being in the f-its”. She describes it as a cold barren place, but one of great power. Because once you’re there there’s no reason to not push back on stupid.

  85. Ann O'Nemity*

    Malicious Compliance: The $20 Lesson

    My company uses a travel agency’s booking platform that invoices departments directly for costs. However, it doesn’t allow conference-rate bookings, which require going directly to the hotel’s website with a special code. So, employees can book outside the platform—but only if they’re willing to float the cost.

    On my first work trip, I booked a conference-rate hotel using my own card to save the company hundreds. My flight home wasn’t until evening, so I paid a $20 late check-out fee to work from my room instead of squatting in the loud hotel coffee shop. A month after submitting a reimbursement request for the travel charges, my entire request was denied because late check-out was “not a required business need.”

    Cue frustration: I’m now floating over a grand on my card for hotel charges because of a $20 fee.
    Determined, I enlisted ChatGPT to draft a multi-page thesis proving that $20 was, in fact, a legitimate business expense—complete with productivity analyses, co-working space cost comparisons, and detailed documentation of the work I was able to complete from the hotel room. Must have been compelling; Finance approved the reimbursement.

    But I didn’t feel great about eating the credit card interest incurred while waiting for reimbursement, which Finance didn’t want to cover. Out came ChatGPT to draft another exhaustive (exhausting?) argument, including opportunity cost analyses. 2 for 2, I got the interest charges reimbursed too.

    Now? I book everything through the travel agency’s platform, no matter how absurdly overpriced it is. All because they refused my entire reimbursement request over the $20 late check-out fee.

  86. Friendgineer*

    When my friend and I were in college, she had a really nasty math teacher who also taught Java. My friend typed up her Java homework on a manual typewriter. Just glorious.

    (The math teacher and her spouse are truly rancid – I mean my friend and I went to a dance concert at school and the spouse was there and he GROWLED at her – but that is a whole other set of crazy stories. They no longer are at our alma mater, thankfully.)

    1. Slow Gin Lizz*

      Please excuse my ignorance, but why was it bad that the Java homework was done on a typewriter?

      1. Hlao-roo*

        I’m not Friendgineer but my best guess is that then the teacher would have to manually type the code into a computer to test that it works. Presumably the other students sent their codes to the teacher in a Word doc, an email, or some other format where it’s easy to copy/paste it into Java to test that the code works.

        1. Slow Gin Lizz*

          That’s kind of what I was thinking, but then why didn’t the teacher just require the code to be in some kind of electronic format? Don’t get me wrong, I do love this story, I’m just so curious as to why the teacher was such a doof.

          1. Slow Gin Lizz*

            And I do applaud Friend for taking the time to type up the assignment on a typewriter. That seems like a lot of extra work, because presumably Friend would have done the work on a computer to be sure the code worked and *then* typed it on a typewriter. Nice work, Friend.

          2. MsSolo (UK)*

            I strongly suspect that after receiving handwritten code in the past, they’d specified “typed” in the instructions, without considering that something can be typed and no more useful to them than handwrittten.

      2. I Have RBF*

        Ahahahaha!

        Because Java is a programming language, and the homework is meant to be able to be compiled and run on a computer, and so should just be printed out from a computer. Ideally it should be submitted in pre-compilation electronic format, so that all the instructor needs to do it compile it and run it.

        1. Slow Gin Lizz*

          Right? So the prof was really dumb because she didn’t specify that she wanted it submitted electronically. Way to game the system, Friend!

  87. Prefer Not To*

    When homework started for my kid in elementary school, they attempted to get out of completing weekly homework packets because, as a child of deep integrity, it would be unlawful and dishonest to complete homework labeled “Monday” if it was Tuesday, etc. They would nobly take the incomplete rather than misrepresent their prompt attention to the work. It took confirmation from the teacher that all homework was expected to be completed at the end of the week regardless of the label on the worksheet for this kid to abandon this philosophy.

    I only wish they paid as much attention to detail in the actual homework!

  88. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

    Alison, does averted Malicious Compliance count?

    An old remote job, the “company car” was an unreliable Saab from the ’80’s (over 20 years old at this point) that was wont to draw down its battery with an electrical drain while parked. After being stuck with it once, I drove my own car onsite and, per Finance instructions, submitted IRS mileage for reimbursement. While onsite, I moonlighted as the team’s personal Uber, driving everyone to hotels and meals and generally just being a team player. My car is fun to drive, I enjoyed my team’s company; it may as well have been carpooling to me.

    After a new Financial Analyst and CFO were hired, the policy changed and no mileage reimbursement going forward for anyone. I did the math, said “fine, I’ll write it off on my taxes,” and kept driving anyway. After a meeting, the team went out to lunch. New CFO was introduced and joined us; he was baffled that I was remote, yet was driving 4 of my peers in my own car to the lunch. I explained the situation, he did the back of the napkin math, and facepalmed hard.

    About an hour after lunch, I got an email from the new CFO: I was to research flights to and from home and send him the most convenient choice. He would approve it, then that was the value I was to submit for my travel expense going forward and this would be the process going forward. My supervisor, all Finance, and the CEO were CC’d. Apparently, I had saved the company a few grand in costs and boosted morale and productivity by eschewing the malicious compliance, so in return I ended up with a better reimbursement than I had been getting previously.

    1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

      The no mileage reimbursement was due to the company only reimbursing us for flight costs going forward. Oops!

      1. Slow Gin Lizz*

        So, if I understand correctly, instead of getting reimbursed for mileage while driving your own car in, you were getting reimbursed flight costs but still just driving yourself in?

        1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

          That was CFO’s solution. I’d submit costs* as if I had flown, but to go ahead and drive anyway; he didn’t think it was right that I’d only receive itemization credit for mileage on my taxes and save the company on taxi and uber fees.

          Had I maliciously complied, I’d still have had to deal with flights and TSA, we’d all have to deal with uber/taxis, and the business wouldn’t have even noticed the maliciousness.

          *If you really wanted to get technical, I could have run up my mileage by taking long routes, where the fights were fixed at the posted fares, but those weren’t games it ever would dawn on me to play. My time is worth more than ~$0.50/mi to me.

          E.g. Driving was ~$300. $300 off my taxable income was like $45 reduction in tax liability. The flights were ~$450. He told me to submit the same $450 my peers were, because my driving was saving the company like ~$3,500 in productivity and uber/taxi fees. I spent ~$80-120 in gas each trip.

          1. LBD*

            I had to puzzle this out a bit, but when I got there, wow! Not just a win, win, but a WIN, WIN, WIN!
            Is this a good time to mention that I adore your user name, even though my latin is sketchy at best? I feel like the cleverness that went into it also shows in your non-malicious compliance.

  89. Prefer Not To*

    I didn’t have the courage/gumption to do this, but I will share what would have been my most delightful malicious compliance, had I not been worried about burning a bridge.

    My first professional office job was at a place with an extremely detailed dress code. It was pages long and included some really specific references, which I correctly inferred to mean “Co-Worker wore this once and Director didn’t like it”. After reading that leather trousers were forbidden in this dress code, I have, for YEARS, regretted that I did not wear my pair of patent pleather bell bottoms from an old dance costume on my last day in that office. Turns out I never needed that bridge. WISTFUL SIGH.

  90. Elizabeth West*

    I don’t have any work ones, so here’s a high school one I may have mentioned before. We had a beloved principal I’ll call Mr. Pin (as in neat as a pin) whom everyone liked immensely. Mr. Pin was stern but kind. He always dressed very professionally in a crisp jacket and tie. He and his family moved away right before my senior year, and the school hired a new guy I’ll call Mr. Sloppy. His shirt was always untucked, pants baggy, tie too short, and his hair often looked like a messy department store mannequin wig. Quite the contrast from Mr. Pin.

    Our high school and middle school were in the same building at the time, with the middle school being off down a wing by itself, a communal lobby where the office was, and the high school and gym taking up two floors on the other side of the building. Mr. Sloppy’s first order of business was to clear up the congestion in the hallways between classes. He did this by instigating a rule that we were to walk on the right-hand side of the corridor at ALL times.

    Our lockers were on the walls opposite and between the classrooms. Before the rule, we all walked down the middle in a sort of organically moving slurry. Sloppy’s edict made things worse — the way the lockers were, a lot of people had to cross the hall to get to class. So we were always cutting someone off or bumping into someone who was trying to get into their locker.

    Being assholes as only teenagers can be, we came up with our own solution. We kept to the right as we were told, but when we reached our classrooms, we stopped, turned to the left, and loudly went “BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP” like a truck backing up to warn approaching students of our impending crossing. The warning beacons were not confined to the class clowns or the troublemaker kids — most of us were doing it. This went on for a couple of weeks before Mr. Sloppy hit his breaking point and rescinded the rule.

    For some odd reason, both the clocks and the bells were off-kilter during that entire school year, too. It almost felt as if the school itself were grieving Mr. Pin’s departure and objecting to the presence of Mr. Sloppy.

    1. Determined detour*

      See, I would have just mazed it. Kept walking on the right all the way along the corridor until I got to the end and finally came back the other way. Possibly detouring around the walls of the occasional classroom if I thought I could get away with it.

  91. Hexiv*

    The guy describing his own body in a shirt that doesn’t fit well as “not for the squeamish” kind of makes me sad – I mean, I guess he’s got a right to talk about his body however he wants, but on the other hand, however you talk about yourself, other people with similar body types are catching strays.

    1. Workerbee*

      He absolutely has the right to talk about his body however he wants, yes, I agree. And I don’t think you need to waste an iota of sad about it, either.

      Look at it this way: If people are old enough to read and understand a forum like this, they are old enough to understand that he is writing for himself, aka not AT them, and they need not apply what he says about himself directly to themselves. Or hey, maybe it’s a teachable moment, then, about context and individuality.

    2. H3llifIknow*

      I disagree. I’m not skinny by any means, but if I said something negative about MY body and someone else got all “oh so I guess I’m fat too then, huh?” about it, I’d think they were pretty narcissistic to take MY comment about MY body and make it about them.

    3. Peanut Hamper*

      Not everything on the internet (or the world) is for you, though.

      Life gets a lot easier once you internalize that fact.

    4. londonedit*

      Further up he mentions he’s British – this is a textbook example of British self-deprecating humour. Nothing to worry about.

    5. Rowan*

      No, I agree -I know that some people find my body disgusting, but I don’t have to pretend that’s right, fair, or reasonable of them.

    6. D*

      I really do get what you’re saying, but he’s describing his body *in a poorly fitting garment*.
      Also a number of the comments sound pretty thirsty for him.

  92. Red*

    Teachers were required to submit detailed lesson plans at the beginning of each week. The expectation was that if the principal picked up your plans out of the basket and walked into your classroom, you would be teaching what was listed in that section of your weekly plan. Teachers knew that nobody ever read the lesson plans, which was evident by how long they remained in the basket we were “required” to deposit the paper copies of our plans.
    So, one guy writes in his lesson plans: I will write “LAZY” in sharpie on the forehead of any student who has not completed the homework assignment for the day. On that day, there was one student who had not completed his homework, and the teacher followed through (except with crayola, which is washable). When complaints hit the desk of the administrator, the teacher fished his lesson plans out of the basket and handed them to the principal. HR agreed with the union: the principal had approved the plans because he did not flag the entry in advance.
    That lesson plan requirement went the way of the dodo.

    1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

      Poor kid; being the pawn in an adult power struggle is stiff for missing a day’s homework.

      1. Zombeyonce*

        Yeah, I feel bad for the kid who got roped in. I understand not wanting to keep going on with the lesson plan farce, but they could have dealt with it in a way that didn’t involve humiliating a child.

        1. Observer*

          Agreed.

          What should have happened is the teacher *and* the principal who “approved” it should have both been penalized. Of course, we know that’s never going to happen. But a halfway decent principle should have been looking very carefully at this teacher’s other interactions with students. Because this was a really awful thing to do.

    2. Dr. Rebecca*

      I did this as a university prof once. The chair was making my life hell, and demanded lesson plans for approval (contra to what was clearly spelled out in our contracts), so while in constant communication with the union rep, I complied. She then complained about one of my classroom practices leaving out the union rep, but adding in legal to the email chain. I copied the rep back in, and reminded her that she had approved of the lesson plan which I had submitted to her earlier in the week.

  93. NameWithheld*

    I was the student chem lab manager in school (I had to track who got what out of the locked closet, confirm they were allowed to have it, safety watch, etc) The locks in the lab were super easy to pick, and I was in a lockpicking phase, so I’d pick the locks instead of getting the key. This was discovered and frowned upon, and they said I had to go and get the key every time. (it’s not like I was breaking into places I didn’t have permission to get to! I just didn’t want to bother going to the key box each time).
    So with the new directives in place (that I had to go to the key box every time I got supplies) I would go to the key box, pick /that/ lock, get the appropriate key, got to the cabinet, pick the lock on the cabinet, hand out the supplies and log them, close the lock up (with the picks), and return the unused key to the keybox.
    (eventually they got better locks on the cabinets, and I stopped bothering to try and pick them during work hours)

  94. Bury Them In Paperwork*

    I had a manager who insisted that we do weekly reports of what we did. We were all managers ourselves (deans and directors in higher education) and a lot of our work revolved around just answering questions and troubleshooting problems related to people and projects that came up as we worked. No day was the same, and it wasn’t like it was something where we all did the same stuff either. I also had responsibility for operating a major facility and a daily accounting for a weekly report often included information that frankly wasn’t his business because I needed to keep a particular compliance reporting firewall between him and the details of the incidents. So my reports were incredibly vague but also very long. After a couple of months of this practice, he quit asking for them. Some of my colleagues also did the “bury him in information” tactic while others flat-out refused because it took an hour of their time every week and they simply didn’t have it to give.
    This guy was fired for other reasons after only six months….but that report thing didn’t help him.

  95. WhyAreThereSoManyBadManagers*

    I used to work in a call center that had ridiculous micromanagement demands. Like insisting we email the manager if we spent more than 5 minutes in the bathroom to provide reasoning why. Did I mention this call center was 95% female. We all decided management needed to know every intimate details of period flow, period pain, period poops, also if we’d had a bean burrito for lunch and it didn’t set well…we were brutally honest (to other grown adults who should know better) about why 5 minutes is often not long enough for bathroom needs…after about a week they changed their policy to allow for 7 minutes per bathroom break and no explanation required. Humans are so stupid sometimes.

  96. Khai of the Fortress of the Winds*

    In grade school I had a teacher who wanted us to keep a reading log. I read a lot. Like 5 books a day at that point. I also hate doing pointless tasks. I might have been tempted to do this for my english teacher, but this was for social studies and geography. So I didn’t write anything down on my reading log. The teacher knew I read a lot, so a week before the end of the semester she sent me up to the library to make a list. So I did, starting at the first shelf and going alphabetically to the right. I stopped at 300 titles. I also got to spend my last couple of days in the library instead of class.
    Now I own a bookstore in the same small town. The teacher is one of my customers. She pretends she doesn’t remember me.

    1. Enough*

      When I was in 8th grade I decided to read as many books in the school library as I could. So I started at the first set of shelves next to the door. My first book was a biography of Abigail Adams. I think I read about half the books in the library although it was a small library.

      1. Resentful Oreos*

        Francie Nolan from Brooklyn, is that you?

        (Francie is the bookworm narrator of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and one summer she makes it her project to read every book in the library starting with A. I can’t remember how far she got.)

        1. Meri*

          It’s been a while since I read it, but it was actually every book in the library, in alphabetical order by author. She made it at least into the Bs, because at one point she had a book by an author named Brown.

    2. darsynia*

      Ahahhaha high five, well done! I was homeschooled till 5th grade (age 10), and my first few book reports were very lackluster because I found the books they gave me very boring. The teacher let me pick my own, but she cautioned me that she would be reading the book and if I got details wrong or tried to cheat them she’d be VERY disappointed in me.

      I chose Gone With the Wind. My book report was about the differences between the film and movie versions.

      The teacher said she’d trust me from that point on.

      1. bishbah*

        I also had a friend in fifth grade choose “Gone With the Wind” for a book report. I picked “The Once and Future King.” Our poor teacher…

    4. A perfectly normal-size space bird*

      I was a voracious reader throughout grade school. I was also a very fast reader (still am on both counts). I got it from my mom, who has also been a voracious and fast reader since childhood. One of my teachers absolutely refused to believe I had read all the books on our summer reading list. We were apparently supposed to pick only five books from the list to read, not read all of them. She refused to give me credit for any of them and gave me detention because I was obviously lying.

      I go crying to my mom, who makes a phone call to the teacher. Teacher tells mom she’ll give me credit for every book I actually did read for the whole summer, but I had to write a one page report on every book I read, which included a summary, two important events in the book, and how it ended. And I had to get my mom to sign each one of them. Mom, who had seen me devour all the books within the first month of summer break and had to keep shuttling me to the library, was like ok, if that’s what she wants that’s what she’s going to get.

      So bless my mom because she spent the whole weekend on this with me. We went through each book one by one and I dictated while mom typed it up on her electric typewriter. Then mom signed each one and on Monday, she came to school with me and presented the stack of reports to the teacher.

      Detention was canceled and that teacher never questioned my reading again.

      1. Ally McBeal*

        I was also a precocious and voracious reader. I was independently reading the Narnia books by first grade (I mean, with some help from my parents or a dictionary if I didn’t understand something, but still independently). My mom told me many years later that she got into a big argument with my first grade teacher because that teacher called home and told my mom I was lying about my reading skills. My mother temporarily gave up her career to be a stay-at-home mom and read to me as much as humanly possible, so this was also an insult to her parenting – she laid into that teacher, who never made a peep again about it, but DID pivot to calling me bossy in all my progress reports. No idea why she didn’t just test my reading abilities directly instead of going straight to calling home.

      2. Chauncy Gardener*

        HA!!! I’m the same way. I used to read books by holding them under the desk in 5th grade because I was so bored. The teacher pounced on me and grabbed the book to try to shame me in front of the class for not paying attention. The book was Anna Karenina. She shut up right quick and never gave me a hard time again. Heh.

        1. A perfectly normal-size space bird*

          During silent reading time, I’d finish the assigned chapter in no time but would get in trouble if I tried to read ahead. So I started slipping other books inside my textbook to read those instead, usually the classics. I wasn’t as clever as I thought I was, though, since I was the only one propping my book up instead of laying it flat and then I’d get in trouble for reading a different book.

          All these years later, it still ticks me off that I would literally get in trouble for reading. If I was not doing the assigned reading, sure, but I did that and then wasn’t allowed to read beyond that? Just supposed to sit quietly? We lived in a state notorious for illiteracy, you’d think they’d be encouraging more! It annoyed my mom too. The only times I never got in trouble for poor marks on my progress report was whenever the teacher complained that I read too much.

    5. Imtheone*

      My lovely fourth grade teacher wanted us to summarize each book we read, and then she would put a cut out of a caterpillar (or centipede?) leg with our name on it at the top of the bulletin boards and blackboards that went around the room. I read at least a book a day, but hated to stop and write up summaries of the books. My teacher knew I was always reading. I did enough summaries to look okay, but I was far from the one who had the most caterpillar feet.
      The students who read the most got a prize at the end of the year (probably a book). The teacher got an extra book for me, since she knew I had read the most books. I still have it – The Enormous Egg. Not a great book, but I really valued being recognized.

  97. LifebeforeCorona*

    I worked at a corporate retreat business that did all day conferences, retreats, meetings etc. One of the perks was that snacks, beverages and lunches were included in the fees for use of the space. Usually, we include a vegetarian and/or vegan option and keep a few frozen gluten free and dairy free products on hand in case we need them. An attendee complained that they didn’t like the frozen option. So the manager changed the intake sheet that was sent out to clients stating that any dietary preference could be accommodated. Then the next group sent in their requests; Keto, vegan, vegetarian, paleo, low salt, no sugar, pescatarian, FODMAP, Mediterranean, organic food only, specialty teas and coffees. Of the 60 attendees there were at least a dozen special meal requests. So we accommodated them. We purchased the necessary ingredients or food for the special diets. The manager looked at the food invoices and was not happy. At the same time, we pointed out that most of the special meals were left untouched by the group. So the intake form went back to please notify us if you have a medical or religious related food requirement.

  98. FreelanceVandal*

    Back before mere mortals had access to the internet, I was working as a Software Quality Engineer for a large, expensive information service. I was responsible for testing our client software with modems from a variety of manufacturers. My group had an informal arrangement with the internal computing group that maintained our office and lab computers. The gist of it was we could reconfigure things to meet our needs. If we horked things up, we owned the problem. This arrangement worked well until some idiot stole all the memory from all the computers located in open areas.

    A decree came down from levels above reason that the access screws for all computers would be replaced with security screws and only the internal computing folk would have access to the magic screwdriver that worked with them. In the corporate vernacular, these screws became known as the Nazi screws. To 99% of the company, this was a nothing burger. For me, this was a headache.

    I ping the internal computing folk to figure out how this was going to work in my situation. I was told to make a service request and that someone would come by, open my computer, and lock everything back down when the task had been completed. “The tech will stay there while you complete the task. Yes, you have to make a service request for each device.” I submit 26 service requests.

    The tech shows up at my office with the printout of one of them. He opens my box. I install the internal modem and run my tests. I remove the modem; the tech assumes I’m done and starts to put my machine back together. I tell him I’m not done yet. I must test this pile of modems today. Are you going to stick around while I do that, or come back when the next ticket ends up in your queue, or ??? He tells me he can’t stick around because he has other tickets to deal with.

    I explain that I need to test these by EOB and suggest he look at the tickets I’d entered that morning. He pulls them up, turns green, and tells me he needs to talk to somebody. An hour or so later, he comes back, hands me a bag of thumbscrews, and starts removing the Nazi screws.

      2. FreelanceVandal*

        The “why” was pretty clear. There was a high demand for RAM in the mid-90s. The thief was never caught but we suspected whoever did it put it up for sale on eBay.

        1. Observer*

          Yeah. For anyone who wasn’t paying for this stuff, you could easily pay $1,000 per MEGAbyte. Yes, *mega*, not giga. In 90’s dollars.

  99. 3-Foot Tall Inflatable Rainbow Unicorn*

    I once ran afoul of another technical write who, for whatever reason, intended to rewrite every instruction I’d documented from “their own personal experience with the software.” Only they didn’t know how to USE the software, so they kept asking me to explain it. When I pointed out I had explained it with detailed documentation, I kept getting “But I don’t want to rewrite you, I want to write entirely from scratch from my personal experience.”

    So, I finally started giving her step-by-step instructions. After a while, she told me I was giving very clear instructions and how much she appreciated the effort I was taking.

    I told her, “Thank you. I’m reading my user guide out loud.”

    2. MigraineMonth*

      I have never once looked to technical documentation hoping to get insight into the writer’s personal experiences. Am I doing it wrong?

      1. 3-Foot Tall Inflatable Rainbow Unicorn*

        LOL! I’m pretty sure she was doing it just to scrub my name off the editing chain; she was full of petty power plays like that before she got fired.

  100. cncx*

    I know I have said this in years past but it is still my petty win. A colleague at my level would pester me on teams once a month to send her a code in an excel sheet on our share drive. I would always send her the file path and every time she would be like “but it is easier to ask you”- easier than clicking on a hyperlink? So since this code was ten ish characters long, I just started screenshotting it so she would have to type it.

    1. HB*

      Good for you.

      Not a malicious compliance thing, but it reminds me of the time that I was talking to my mother on the phone and she told me to go look at some lamp she found online. I asked her to just email me the link, but she kept saying “Go here, click this, then this, etc.” After several minutes of this back and forth it finally came out that she *did not know how to copy and paste*.

      Now, that’s fine – it’s a thing that may take some time to learn when you start using a computer in your 40s. But she had been using a computer, email, etc at this point for well over 5 years. And she had *sent me emails prior to this with links to websites* some of which were long/gobbledygook URLs with lots of random strings of letters because it was some online store or whatnot. The horror I still experience when I remember she had been *typing these in* all this time…

      1. CAH*

        Gah!
        My sister-in-law with a chronic illness keeps a detailed log of medications, doctors’ visits, etc. I was helping her replace her computer, which is how I learned that while she had figured out how to use Word to type up her document, and she had figured out how to save her Word file, she had never figured out how to find her saved file. So she would type up her log, print it, and save it. When she needed to add to it, she would *re-type the entire thing* from her printout, add the new info, and print it again.
        I still haven’t managed to teach her to find her saved file.

  101. Quitting Timely*

    I was an admin supporting multiple tenured professors. A couple were working on projects that involved checking out special books with a five year return timeline. The professors would usually hand the books to me to be turned back in to the library. At some point, the library changed their procedures on where to drop these books and didn’t bother to tell us admins. I dropped the books in the usual place..and they sent a college-wide angrygram. So I emailed their lead asking her where they’d prefer I leave these books in the future. She said I should email the professor’s assigned librarian and they would send a student worker to get the books at their earliest opportunity. Great!

    A few weeks later, I had a couple books to return, and emailed the appropriate librarian. She replied saying I should “handle it [my]self.”

    I’ll note here that our librarians were in a bit of a weird hierarchical position: they were staff (lowest tier) but also non-tenured faculty (higher tier). They had told me they’d send a worker when their staff position was being emphasized, but then an announcement came out underscoring their faculty positions (and giving them some recognition and pay bumps they absolutely deserved) and unfortunately most of them had let it go to their heads. They had completely dropped any pretense of collegiality with the staff, and this was kind of my last straw.

    So I “handled it” by following their lead’s instructions: the appropriate librarian had been informed that books were ready for pick up, and the books would be in my office, ready for pick up, until a student worker from the library was sent to retrieve them.

    When I left that job a year and a half later, the pile had grown to approximately 50 books and 20 periodicals. All stacked up neatly in a corner, waiting for the student worker to fetch them. I made sure to put a sticky note on that stack before I left for good: “The library is sending someone to pick these up.”

  102. BlackCatOwner*

    Reading all of these time tracking things is giving me nightmares because I work in a manufacturing firm and everything we make is produced by human labor. (Imagine handmade furniture. We use pwoer tools but we’re making one-of-kind objects, with zero automation.) We have 6 technicians. We want to them to track the hours they spend on each job. Not minute tasks, just “today I worked 4 hours Job A and 2 hours Job B”

    Our purpose is figuring out how long it takes to build things so that we get more accurate at estimating the time needed for jobs, so that we improve costumor service AND aren’t over committing and asking our techs to work over time. We’re also not measuring them against any kind of expected daily metric. (i.e if you book 4 hours of time to Job A today, and no hours to Job B, we’re not actually concerned where the other 4 hours went – we assume you were doing something useful with that time like cleaning the shop or doing non-job related tasks like calibrating a tool.)

    The biggest hurdle is that we think folks are going to be reluctant to do this for all the weird BS management things people have cited here. In reality this data will help everyone, including them, and help us raise profits (a job that takes 120 hours should have a higher price than one that takes 40 hours. As a small private business, we do profit share, so more profits = bigger bonuses for everyone).

    We plan to explain all this to the technicians, but – we still think it’s going to make people jumpy and reluctant to report accurately.

    1. blitzen*

      My last job had that sort of tracking. What made it work is how much they emphasized they were watching the projects, and not us, and we believed them.

    2. HB*

      Emphasize all the ways it helps them – particularly with respect to overtime. For example, if you currently think it takes 10 hours to make Chair A but actually, on average, it takes 40, then you’ll know not to do a rush order of a set of 8 of them a week before Christmas.

      The other thing I’d point out is that the key is to figure out the general average, and the best way to figure that out is through data… LOTS of data. Because sometimes people just hit strides where they work faster/more efficiently and they tend to think of that as the bar of how long the project “should” take.

    3. Disappointed Australien*

      I work in software but we generally have exactly that requirement. Someone guesstimated that it might take 18 hours work to do new task X but they’d like to know how long it actually took. Please.

      I think what helps is being told that a: this is not related to how many hours you get paid for and b: we’re not going to Taylorise you on this (viz, sweat you on the time). Part of it is the suck it and see process, and if anyone does the “it took you EIGHT HOURS to make table leg???!?!?” thing watching someone senior jump on that person and say very firmly “yes. Now we know. That’s something that’s really useful for us to know. We should think about whether we want to be selling table legs tat take 8 hours to make”.

    4. MigraineMonth*

      I worked at a company that did this kind of project-time tracking. It was made really clear that the purpose was to get better future estimates, so we should be as honest as possible. We were all exempt, so I thought that made sense. Then my manager had a performance talk with me based on the project-time tracking logs. He was concerned I wasn’t putting in enough hours over 40, even though I was exempt.

      If you want honesty on those logs, you *have* to make sure nobody is going to use them for performance evaluation.

    5. Alexander Graham Yell*

      My job has this kind of tracking and what made it less scary was being told “We don’t need to see 8 hours a day every day tracked. We only need to see actual time spent working on client projects. We assume you will have other things you need to do in a day, and we don’t need that tracked, and we won’t be upset if you do things like spend time talking to your coworkers (as long as they don’t have something else they need to do). We only need to make sure we are accurately planning project timelines and staffing to track how profitable we are.” *And then they followed through on that*

      I have only ever been questioned on the hours I have recorded when they thought it was too low, and when I was able to explain why, they accepted it and moved forward. It has never come up in an end of year review, it has never been a discussion or concern.

      The only thing I was EVER told about my tracking was, “By the way, the system will send an automatic email for the days you don’t log any project work, so feel free to split up your work over the week when you record it.”

      1. MigraineMonth*

        This is exactly what went wrong when my company implemented it. They required *everything* be tracked, then got on our case about spending too much time on email or breaks, even though we were exempt and regularly expected to work until 8pm or to travel and work 12-hour shifts. So everyone logged their breaks as project time (I passive-aggressively logged mine as “time spent filling out my time log”) and the company got garbage project time data.

    6. Speak*

      I work as an engineer and I have to report that kind of detail to our SAP system. When we sell a job we quote what we think it will take (w# of electrical assembly hours, x# of mechanical assembly hours, y# of mechanical design hours, z# of electrical design hours) and when the project is complete or at milestone times, we see how accurate the quote was. If the quote was over, we made more profit, but we could lower it next time something similar comes along. If we charged more hours, we didn’t make as much profit, so we should quote more hours next time, possibly just because that customer required weekly meetings that weren’t quoted or were just difficult to work with & required extra hand holding at steps. This is very common to track to that level for custom work. Also we have a tracking code for things like training, computer down time, customer support, and quoting, so even when us engineers don’t have a full 8hrs of project work, we have places to show that we are still working and being useful. We are also supposed to track accurate hours, so any (unpaid) overtime is still tracked.

  103. Kim S*

    Worked at a bookstore that got two large bins (think banker box) of mail daily. The majority of the mail had the owner’s name on it, though he didn’t deal with most of it. One day he announced he wanted to be given every piece of mail that had his name on it. We warned him, but he couldn’t be dissuaded, so we gave him all the mail. Took a week for him to change his mind.

    1. Curious*

      Reminds me of the judge asking for the mail sent to Santa Claus in “Miracle on 34th Street.”

  104. NYWeasel*

    My team handles work that crosses between multiple functions within our company—sales, operations, design, etc. Because of this we get bounced around the org almost yearly and every time a new VP takes us on, the first thing they want to do is question our staffing budgets, which are massive due to the volume of support we provide. So every year or so, we get a mandate handed down like “No more overtime” while also being told that we can’t hire anyone new either. A month or two of maliciously complying by telling stakeholders that we’d *LOVE* to handle (annoying but crucial task) only we’re at the limit for OT almost always gets the limits rescinded super fast.

  105. ACM*

    Mine’s a small one from my time as a janitor.

    One of the things I did was clean carpet. This woman asked for her office’s carpet to be cleaned, I went in and did it. I took cell phone pictures of her office’s layout so I could put everything back exactly as it was before I cleaned it. I even ran the carpet extractor to suck most of the moisture out of the carpet so it’d be dry when she came back in.

    The next day, my supervisor said the woman complained that her office hasn’t been cleaned because she couldn’t smell anything and she knew I hadn’t moved her office furniture. The base cleaner we use doesn’t smell like much of anything unless was undiluted, and then it smelled like oranges.

    So that night, I re-did it, but I didn’t put anything back in place, and found a bottle of this really, really, strongly lavender-scented cleaner we had a bottle of for some reason, and poured a couple drops behind her office door. And I didn’t run the extractor over it, I left it damp. In her 10 x 12 office. With the door closed.

    The next day, my supervisor said the woman had to go home because of a headache, that the smell of oranges was too strong.

  106. Ace in the Hole*

    I used to work at a small mom & pop sandwich shop. We had a lot of options for condiments and toppings. Every single day I’d take multiple phone orders along the lines of “I want a turkey sandwich with EVERYTHING on it.” When I tried to clarify, the customers would often get snippy and rude – even when I politely explained that we had four kinds of mustard, three kinds of mayo, three different hot peppers, two types of pickle, avocados, carrots, olives, and various other things that most people don’t want on a turkey sandwich. Inevitably it would turn out they meant something like turkey with regular mustard, mayo, lettuce, maybe some cheese or tomato. Not even close to “everything.”

    On my very last day, one of these rude customers called in yet again and demanded a turkey sandwich with EVERYTHING on it. So I said “Yes ma’am,” and made one. Alas, I clocked out before she picked up her turkey sandwich with EVERYTHING on it.

  107. anonymous 4 this*

    We have a manager that has been watching us to the minute to make sure we are on time. We are hoping it stops because we had a conversation with the union and they went and spoke to management. Especially seeing as we are allowed to work x minutes of overtime without being paid.

    But if any of us get dinged for 5 or 10 minutes, we plan to put in overtime forms every time we are early or late. Even if we don’t technically get paid for that, just to flood them with paperwork and make a point.

    1. Kevin Sours*

      Pretty sure that’s illegal. You are allowed to round your time clock to a reasonable time interval but you have to do it consistently. Not that illegal always means that companies don’t get away with doing it.

      1. anonymous 4 this*

        We don’t even have a time clock, most of us take transit, and we are in a highly trained career. We all get our work done and are rarely even 5 minutes late unless there is a transit delay. The 5 minutes late is also by which clock? We have clocks that are different by up to 5 minutes.

        It is a little nuts.

  108. Fluff*

    Part of my job is predicting future malicious non compliance by program users. Designers insist on adding more clicks for users in the guise of safety, reporting data, making users “pause before they click,” etc. Basically they want the users – in this case, doctors and nurses – to click and enter more information, click and do something else, etc.

    This is like the pop ups you get when you go to a company website looking for information. Before you can even find the information or scroll down, you get an in-your-face request to enter your email (save money!). Then you have to wait an eternity for the little x to appear so you can close it. Or you can only decline by clicking the snarky “I do not want to save money.”

    This happens in electronic medical records too – just as annoying and passive aggressive. Imagine, you open a chart and get an immediate pop up about a “patient smokes, click here to order smoking cessation teaching and nicotine gum” and you are the ICU doctor rounding trying to order changes to the patient’s ventilator (i.e. breathing machine – unconscious – certainly not smoking right now). I am exaggerating here, but you get the idea.

    Most alerts are maligned by end users and trigger some impressive non compliance. Especially if the way to get rid of an alert is to click other which requires typing a reason. Yes, these often include some spectacular curses.

    If I think new alerts going live will trigger an especially vociferous reaction from the users,
    AND
    I have warned about said rebellion…

    I take PTO. On go live day.

    Gods, I miss the screamin’.

    2. MigraineMonth*

      I was staffing a G0-Live where the hospital management had decided to turn alert sensitivity to its highest setting. Every time you tried to administer a medication to a patient that might conceivably have an adverse reaction, there was a separate alert. Not just “this patient is allergic to similar medications” or “there’s a possible medication interaction”. There was also a set of patient-specific alerts that would pop up any time you tried to give them a medication, such as “this patient is under 100lbs; are you sure?” and “this patient is over 65; are you sure?”

      I was helping in the geriatric unit. There was very nearly a riot.

      1. Skeptic53*

        And I bet every time you needed to send a refill for a medication that a patient had been safely taking for decades the pop-up appeared and had to be cleared by entering text as well as clicking boxes.

    3. fluff*

      Nothing changes pleasant doctors and nurses into Dr. Hydes than pop ups, hard stops and stupid stuff that keeps them from doing their jobs. Another aspect is that many of these pop ups or required typings are used to measure something (often equally flawed). When Dr. Hyde responds to these alerts they mess up the reporting. And getting a Dr or nurse to care about reports when they are taking care of the person in front of them is simply not going to happen when these things are badly designed and interrupt their actual work. For example, the pop up alert on a maybe-stroke patient has these options – concerned for stroke, not concerned for stroke, other – requires entering text. Dr. Hyde clicks other and enters fbomb sentence. Dr. Hyde even made a shortcut for their fbomb so they can enter it efficiently. And they shows that to the other Drs. Hydes. Over a month or so, the stroke report becomes useless since more and more users are using the Dr. Hyde quick text.

      For the really egregious EMR (electronic medical record) ‘upgrades’ that make their lives miserable, you up the ant of your compliance. If the new changes are egregious, depending on my ratio of click, typing and overall horribleness of the “new and exciting” requirement I add a nicely worded out of office message.

      An out of office message which includes information on:
      – pop up x: contact chair of x committee.
      – hard stop y: contact chair of y committee.
      – quality questions on new Z changes: Name of Z workgroup.

      They do take me so much more seriously now since I have 100 % track record with my fortune teller predictions.

      1. Skeptic53*

        This kind of crap is why I am sooooooo happy to be retired from practicing medicine. It has become so frigging corporate and unethical. Regular seminars to teach us how to defraud Medicare allegedly with no fear of audit, denying needed care to save $, overpaying the CEO of ONE hospital & 6 clinics to the tune of $16 million a year, and last but not least using EMR exactly as you described to “optimize care” and drive providers nucking futs. I miss my colleagues and patients but not the organization.

  109. Snax*

    I’m a type 1 diabetic, and I have an insulin pump. It beeps to alert me to issues, but different beeps mean different levels of urgency. After the first beep, I tend to pull my pump out of my pocket and silence it and/or immediately address the issue, depending on the level of urgency. My point is, it’s both lifesaving and as unobtrusive as possible.

    My ex boss Dan knew about my insulin pump, but would often publicly chastise me for “checking my phone” with a weird smirk. Maybe he thought being diabetic was embarrassing? Not sure. His remarks often drew more attention than me just trying to fix my pump, which is obviously not what I was going for. Urgh.

    We had an internal meeting once where Dan was extremely strict about no phones in the room, to show our grand boss how focused and productive we were, or something. Because it apparently understands comedic timing, my insulin pump starts beeping halfway through this meeting. Adhering to the no phones rule, I shrug and keep talking through my slides. Beep-beep-beep-beep. My coworkers are starting to get anxious, because they all know (thanks, Dan!) that I should probably be fixing that. BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP. I finish my presentation. Any questions? Two different coworkers ask me to sit down or if they can get me anything to drink. Someone asks if I need an ambulance.

    I’m totally fine – I know my urgent beeps from the non-urgent ones! – but I’m enjoying watching Dan squirm when HIS boss freaks out that he has coached me to ignore medical emergencies in favor of arbitrarily phone-free meetings.

  110. Casey*

    It’s not nearly as maliciously compliant as the teal polo guy, but I had something similar at an office where I worked where we had to wear these (ugly) button down jacket things so we would all look neat and presentable for clients. It was in the employee handbook that you had to wear the jacket, closed, at all times.
    At one point I was pregnant and I knew it wouldn’t fit me much longer, so I emailed HR explaining the issue and asking if I could get another one in a bigger size or if I could stop wearing it. I was told no and no. Ummm. So I kept wearing it, even as it started stretching at the buttons (I wore a t-shirt underneath). Eventually there were certain buttons in the middle I couldn’t button (it was a long jacket), so I left those middle buttons open. I looked absolutely ridiculous.
    This lasted until one day in my 8th month, when HR came marching over to my desk to tell me I shouldn’t wear the jacket anymore.

    1. Just Another Cog*

      Ok, this is pretty funny! I can just imagine your big, round belly poking through the hole.

  111. Julie*

    I worked weird (later) hours compared to the test of my department to accommodate tasks only I had to do.

    My boss sheepishly told me that people thought I wasn’t working the full 40 because I came in at 11 pm, and could I pleased email him when I arrived and left.

    Cool. Will do. I had a terrible project that week that had me working until 2 am. On the second day of me emailing him with my hours for the day he told me I had to stop, that the company would owe me overtime because I was working so much, and they didn’t want a written record that they knew I was working unpaid overtime.

    I declined to stop emailing him my schedule since I’d hate for people to think I’m not putting in at least 40 hours.

    I know this doesn’t sound like a win. Overtime would have been a win. But we were already under a no-shred order from the SEC, and the big boss went to prison for embezzling, so overtime pay wasn’t happening.

    1. linger*

      Just to check, were you arriving 11am?
      (Given (a) far fewer people would observe a 11pm arrival to complain about it, and
      (b) 11pm-2am would be only a 3 hr shift, so wouldn’t involve unpaid overtime)

  112. Graphic Design is My Passion*

    I’ve never seen more malicious compliance than I have working in graphic design. I maliciously comply *every day*. You still want 3 pages of text crammed onto one slide after I’ve patiently explained why it helps your message to break the slides up? You got it!

    Somewhere out there is a digital training module with icons of several medical conditions that can happen to senior citizens. I tried to dissuade them to no avail, so I created the terrifyingly detailed icons of a prolapsed uterus and various urinary tract issues the likes of which no one has ever seen. I still think about it from time to time and hope at least some of the folks taking the training have my same dark sense of humor.

    1. MigraineMonth*

      I do some UI work, and I consider a key part of my job to listen what the client asks for, figure out what they *actually* want, and then give them that instead. Usually they recognize that what I’ve given them works much better, at least when I explain why I opted to do it a different way.

      Every once in a while, though, I work with a real artist who won’t allow any deviation from their vision of how the UI should work. Even when I point out that a drop-down list of over 1,000 items takes several seconds to load and even longer to scroll through, they will have a drop-down list! So I hide the type-ahead control, give them what they insist they want, and them unhide the type-ahead control when they cave under a deluge of user complaints.

  113. GingerRoot*

    I worked for a terrible bully. I was one of his favorite targets and I never knew what bull**** thing he would do next. One day he was looking for me (in the days of full time in the office, before Covid), and couldn’t find me. He had his secretary go all over the office (which wasn’t big), calling for me. She somehow didn’t find me even though I was in the conference room near her desk with a coworker, working on a project. I wasn’t AWOL, I wasn’t even at lunch. I was in the office, working. No, that wasn’t acceptable — he punished me (not the person I was working with, just me). He said I had to tell his secretary every time I left my desk and where I would be. Fine. Every time I went to the bathroom, I told her and she had to tell him about it. That shut that baloney down pretty quickly. (I thought about not writing this comment because what if he sees? But I don’t work for him anymore, so F YOU, former boss! You are a horrible human being.)

  114. Dave*

    At a company I used to work for, we had a annual appraisal system where we had to grade our own performance for the previous year with a number between 1 and 4 in various categorizes. We were told that “It didn’t have to be whole numbers”

    One of the senior engineers just wrote various mathematical constants such as π. Φ, e and so on for all his scores.

    3. MigraineMonth*

      Shit gets complicated when the theoretical mathematicians start writing in imaginary numbers.

  115. The horrors persist but so do I*

    I’m at a non-US company. In our PR the company is supportive of LGBTQ+ issues and we have some extremely basic accommodations that aren’t required by law here. But it’s the usual pinkwashing and performative allyship, and employees can and have been openly homophobic and transphobic with absolutely no consequences from HR or otherwise.
    I’m part of the LGBTQ+ employee organization, and for Pride Month we decided to do a weekly newsletter on basic educational topics about LGBTQ+ issues. It went out to all staff, with the approval of management. A non-zero number of employees took it upon themselves to email us and say it was very inappropriate to be talking about such political topics at work, because people might have different opinions on the matter which we should respect. (By the way, those political topics in our very divisive newsletter were things like “What is Pride Month?” “What does LGBTQ+ stand for?” etc.)
    These “I’M not a bigot, but SOME people might be offended you mentioned that queer people exist and are human” hand-wringers didn’t even have to read the newsletter. They could have deleted it like all the other random spam we get as a big corporation.
    So we replied to them, but dearest colleagues, our values as a company, as stated in our corporate handbook right here, are to be a diverse and inclusive workplace that welcomes all people! Here, see in the news where our corporate name (but no money or meaningful support) is attached to a campaign for marriage equality? And look how we make a rainbow sticker version of our logo every year for Pride! These topics are perfectly in line with our corporate values, and you don’t disagree with our corporate values, do you???
    Anyway, based not wholly but definitely partly on spite, the LGBTQ+ employee group launched a monthly all staff newsletter this year in addition to 4-5 articles we’re planning Pride Month alone. It’s perfectly in line with our stated corporate values, after all!

  116. Suze*

    I worked in a manufacturing plant in the office for about 10 years. A new safety manager came in and decided that wearing high heels and open toe shoes in the office was a safety hazard. Everyone, and I mean everyone, had worn sandals in the summer, high heel shoes with skirt suits and dresses, (this was back in the day when people dressed formally in the office)…FOR YEARS with no safety incidents.

    So, I went out and bought several different pairs of combat boots, and wore them everytime I had on a dress or skirt suit. (This was many years ago when this look was not a thing. It wouldn’t raise eyebrows today but it sure did back then!) Several other women followed suit. There were some comments about unprofessionalism, but by and large upper management also disagreed and thought this was a stupid rule, so the combat boots stayed until I left the company.

    1. MigraineMonth*

      An office where professional attire included dresses paired with combat boots sounds like my kind of company.

  117. DiamondDiatom*

    Working IT Support in a hospital, also on call every two to three weeks (I can get called in the middle night, important for the story).

    I had domain admin rights, so I could do my job, especially while on call. One day however, our system admin decides I shouldn’t have a full domain admin, and remove my rights. He creates a work around that requires him to reset something everytime I used that workaround, before I could use it again. I had to inform him everytime.
    I wasn’t happy about it, but ok…

    So one night, a few things went down, and I got called at 2 AM and 3.30 AM, both times I needed that workaround. So at 3:30 AM I woke up the system admin to reset the workaround after I used it the first time, and at 4:30 AM i woke him up again to reset it, again, because who knows, I might need it later again…

    I got my domain admin back that same day.

  118. AmethystMoon*

    Current company makes us fill out project sheets while working from home, as if we are 5-year-olds and have to put the times we worked on things. Nothing is being billed to anyone, it’s just that we’re working from home and cannot be trusted. Never mind it was the CEO who decided to sell our local office and force us to work from home. Now there are massive layoffs company-wide.

    We also get talked to like a 5-year-old regardless of our job titles or tenure there if we don’t have exactly 7.5 hours worked (because downtime beyond our allowed 15-minute breaks is forbidden). I have been at company over 10 years and never had this in any other job there.
    Certain tasks are supposed to take 4 minutes long (but heaven forbid you read books like Nancy Drew under the age of 10 and novels for fun now, and can complete those tasks in 2 minutes or less), I use the timer on my cell phone so they take exactly 4 minutes each. Can’t wait to find a new job amid all the layoffs.

    1. Slow Gin Lizz*

      I remember once realizing that I must be a much faster reader than average when a coworker wanted me to read an email she’d written before she sent it to be sure it made sense and included all the points she wanted to make. I read the email to myself in front of her and confirmed it was a good email, and she was like, ‘No, you have to read the whole email.’ She seriously thought I hadn’t read the whole thing even though I’d said I had. I then understood why she and my other coworkers said I was such a fast reader, because apparently I am!

      My mother is a similarly fast reader and it impresses me that as a retired person she can read a whole book in a day or two whereas it can take me weeks to get through one these days (b/c work, other hobbies, other distractions, etc). She used to bribe me to go to bed early when I was a kid by saying I could keep the light on and read as long as I wanted to, so I developed good reading habits from a young age.

      1. AmethystMoon*

        I did once get yelled at at an elementary school for reading a book 3 grades above my grade level. Never mind that I said all the books at my grade level were boring, and I was fine with having to look up words I didn’t know in the dictionary. Luckily, I was able to beg my parents to take me to the public library.

        1. Lenora Rose*

          I never understand these teachers who are so completely fussed about “grade level”. I can understand, say, not wanting an 11 year old to read a lurid adult thriller stuffed with gore, but if it’s in an elementary school library, it’s not going to be inappropriate, even if it’s for a more advanced reader.

          1. Slow Gin Lizz*

            Right? Reading grade levels are supposed to be, like, #goals for teachers to get all the kids in their classes reading at, right? So if you have a kid who’s already way above that level, you should be pleased that you don’t have to worry about that kid hitting your #goals, right??

            One of the few things I liked about being a private music teacher is that I could go at whatever pace the kid wanted. Kid didn’t want to practice and wanted to play the same song for six months? Fine, we can do that. Kid learned the piece in a week and wanted to learn more music? Sure thing, let’s move on to the next song.

            1. Lenora Rose*

              I’ve also heard of kids getting excited to read a book below their official grade level and having it *taken away* and being given a grade level book they struggled with. Which sure doesn’t teach them to enjoy reading or do more of it outside class.

              1. Lenora Rose*

                (Full disclosure: I’m not sure if my son reads at official grade level – his teachers don’t seem concerned – but he sure reads below the level I was at at the same age. I blame video, though, not him reading the wrong books. If I see a book I know he’ll WANT to read, even if it’s “young” for him, you can be sure it’s on the shelf in his room as soon as I can possibly arrange it.)

                1. Bird names*

                  Thanks for supporting your son in reading at his own speed! It might pick up later, it might not, but this way he’ll be much more likely to retain his interest in it.

        2. darsynia*

          I posted upthread about this but I was homeschooled until fifth grade, and my teacher got tired of me seeming very bored with age-appropriate or below books for book reports and told me she would let me pick out the book for my next one. She told me in a very stern voice that she would be reading the book and I’d lose this privilege if I didn’t do the work.

          I chose Gone With the Wind (1400 pages/49 hour audiobook). My report was about the differences between the book and the film (because she’d have accused me of just watching the film. Did you know Scarlett had like 8 children? She had at least 1 kid with each husband, and most more than 1). In my defense I was mid-read on that book when I got the chance to do the report, but OH BOY was my teacher displeased with me!

          1. KateM*

            Huh, I wonder if I have read some abridged version. I remember she had one with her first husband (who died during pregnancy so no others), I know one with second, then the daughter with Rhett who died falling from a horse, and then the pregnancy loss when Scarlett fell down the stairs. Who else was there?

  119. An Australian in London*

    In high school, I was part of a gifted program which, among other things, had us take ten subjects in 11th grade compared to the usual 6. I and most of my cohort found this too much workload and we were allowed, even encouraged, to apply to drop a subject or two.

    I wanted to drop Geography. It was an afterthought filler class for me as it wasn’t possible due to combination clashes to get into anything else I wanted. It was neither rewarding nor relevant to my plans for 12th grade and university.

    The Geography teacher insisted I stay until the end of term and complete the end-term assignment. I appealed to the program coordinator saying this was plainly ridiculous, and what was the point in making me do work for a subject I was going to drop? It’s not like forced unnecessary work would awaken in me a last-minute discovery of a love for the subject, and the point of my dropping a subject was to ease my workload and allow me to concentrate on the subjects that were important to my academic future.

    The coordinator upheld the teacher’s ruling. Ok then.

    Each student was assigned an energy source to research and present on. When it was my turn I stood up and said “My assigned energy source was solar energy. Solar energy comes from the sun. Thank you.” And sat down again.

    The Geography teacher was livid. Wanted to force me to do it properly and present again. I said to the program coordinator that I had complied with the requirement to stay until the end of term and present the assignment. “There was no requirement that it be done to any particular standard or achieve a certain grade. This is what happens when you force an unmotivated student to serve a prison sentence in a class they know will not appear in their academic record.”

    Program coordinator agreed with me. I wish I’d been present for the ensuing conversation with the teacher.

  120. EttaPlace*

    Early in my teaching career, admin started requiring daily lesson plans for all of our classes. They were dropped into a file box in our workroom, and no one ever looked at them. I busted my butt getting perfect plans written, but my more experienced mentor had the perfect solution. In the meeting explaining what they wanted in the lesson plans, admin told us to copy what we would normally write in our planning books, no need to fancy it up. So, my mentor took her school issued lesson plan book, deliberately left it blank, bought a separate planner, and turned in copies of the blank plan templates in the school issued book while writing her real plans in her personal planner. No one ever called her on it.

    1. Not a Vorpatril*

      I am glad that I have not had any experience in “turn in your lesson plan” so far. I don’t really work in a lesson-plan sort of way, more create the guided notes that I’ll be using in class and call it good. Formal lesson planning always felt rather… artificial to me, and just didn’t work with how my brain wants to plan/think, I guess.

      Then again, I’m teaching math, which does cut a lot into creativity (yes, you can be creative with lesson planning, but the material being so straight forward still tends to reduce options notably, particularly since we’re always in at least a minor time crunch)

  121. FluffyFlamingo*

    Once I had a boss pull me aside to say that I was talking too much in meetings (I wasn’t, he just disliked a woman knowing more about things that he did). So, malicious compliance, I stopped talking completely. Never uttered a word in meetings for over a week. Boss asked me in a meeting why I wasn’t participating and I got to tell him in front of his boss that “On X Day after Y Meeting, you told me that I was speaking too much and needed to cool it. So I have. Did you want me to stop?” it was glorious.

  122. Two Fluffy*

    Year ago, I worked for a University that ran a busy healthcare clinic. I was the only Spanish-speaking person in our department. There happened to be a position open and my boss quickly hired the daughter of someone who worked at the University’s main campus. We had begged and begged beforehand that another Spanish-speaker be hired because we served a huge population of Spanish-speakers. If I was out sick or something, the clinic was screwed. Anyway, so this gal gets hired and my boss says that she speaks Spanish! Great! It’s on her resume and everything.

    I introduced myself in Spanish and tried talking to her a couple of times. She responded with kind of a non-committal “si” or mumbled something and pretended to be busy. My spider-sense went off. I asked my boss and she assured me that new-gal speaks Spanish.

    “Are you sure? Because she doesn’t…”

    “I’m sure!”

    So… I started forwarding about half my Spanish-speaker calls to her phone and started calling her to the front desk to help with interpreting. It only took about a week for her to angrily admit that she doesn’t actually speak the language.

  123. K*

    I used to work for an agency where the case loads were absurdly high, expectations were unclear and inconsistent, and the management style could most kindly be described as “impulsive.” The manager who hired me had had a clear vision of the program, but she left shortly after I started after her boss called publicly called her a f—-ing idiot when she pushed back about something. She was replaced by a yes-man. Anyway, one day yes-man calls me into his office and informs me I’m now going to be the housing coordinator and prevent ER use by finding housing for all our unsheltered people.
    I’d been attending our local housing coalition’s monthly meetings for years so I knew exactly what this would entail and went right back to my desk and wrote an email saying that per our conversation I would be the housing coordinator and secure housing for our unsheltered clients; best practice due to the cognitive changes resulting from homelessness dictates a case load of no more than 15 clients at any time (note: this was less than 10% of my current caseload). Additionally, all housing agencies in our area had a minimum 2 year wait list for apartments, so would we would be securing funds to provide housing? And then I provided an estimate of annual per capita housing costs for a few different scenarios. I finished by asking when I could expect this to take effect.

    Weirdly, I never heard about it again from either my boss or his boss. Weirdly though, my email was apparently was forwarded to a different program manager who (despite not having been involved in the initial conversation) earnestly assured me that I had misunderstood and that my boss just wanted to make sure I knew that homelessness was a problem.

    Writing this up reminds me how grateful I am not to work there anymore.

  124. Lou's Girl*

    I worked for a fairly large, regional bank that covered about 3 states with nearly 7,000 to 9,000 employees total. The CFO decided that everyone was wasting money on frivolous things like office supplies. He mandated that ALL requisitions for any supplies must come through him. ALL OF THEM. This of course held up the process so even getting a needed pen could take over a month. Some of the Managers got together and quietly decided to do just that- send him a requisition/ request for every single box of pens, box of paper, box of toilet paper, single toners, etc. One box/item at a time. It lasted 2 weeks.

  125. Jaina Solo*

    Not malicious, more petty, but I got restructured in my company a few times going from a boss who didn’t care when/where I worked aside from required meetings, to bosses who were fine with that but then started freaking out when we apparently missed a deadline. Nothing was communicated to me (including if we were behind or not) until after the deadline when they suddenly required me to be in the office on a set schedule. Apparently that was impeding my work–forget the poor communication and adding a whole new system with basically no structured requirements or follow-up to my already busy schedule.

    So I came in on my new schedule, worked exactly those hours, took my lunch break, focused just on the system they were prioritizing, and that was my day. No more thinking outside the box, special development/strategy–just what they said needed doing. But also, since they were so focused on where/when I was working, I chatted with my coworkers during the day. I’d help them with their stuff, just chit chat about life or whatever, get a little work done here and there. Since my hours and location were their focus, that’s what I focused on too. It was definitely petty and I left a couple months later since there was so much going wrong in our department.

  126. warehouse woes*

    I work in logistics, and a while back I was visiting a new warehouse to help set them up. I ran into a guy I’d worked with years ago, who’d been hired on there as a manager. One morning I got in to find that the building was on total stand-down. Found my buddy over by a management desk, asked him what was up. He tells me that he’d been instructed by the building leadership not to make ANY changes without getting it approved by regional. So all the little nudges, starts and stops, last-minute changes, that are needed to keep a hundred thousand boxes moving through a building without disaster – forbidden. Guy was just standing there with his hands on his hips, pleased as punch, watching a conveyor belt of completely gridlocked boxes that he could get cleared in less than five minutes – but of course, he had been told not to.

    As I understand it, he had quite a bit more flexibility after that.

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