the cheap flights, the bursting jacket, and other stories of malicious compliance

by Alison Green on January 21, 2025

Last week we talked about malicious compliance — times when someone purposely exposed the absurdity of a rule by doing exactly what they were told to do. Here are 14 of my favorite stories you shared.

1. The requisitions

I worked for a fairly large, regional bank that covered about three states with nearly 9,000 employees. 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 two weeks.

2. The jacket

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 eighth month, when HR came marching over to my desk to tell me I shouldn’t wear the jacket anymore.

3. The insulin pump

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 grandboss 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.

4. The “accommodation”

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.

5. The travel reimbursements

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 for the remainder of my time there.

6. The write-up

When I worked in a now-bankrupt bridal store as a supervisor, the assistant manager and district manager 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 assistant manager 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.

7. The hours

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 two 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.

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.

8. The sandwich with “everything”

I used to work at a small mom and 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.

9. The Spanish speaker

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. 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 the new person 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.

10. The overshare

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 kiosk. I had to make a break for the restroom 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.

11. The flights

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 five flights, via places like Istanbul and Amsterdam.

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

He was very smug about it.

12. The physical

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 six 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.

13. The $20

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.

14. The twist

In my first role ever managing people, I was a student “account executive” at the on-campus design shop that made posters for the on-campus clubs and activities. One of the designers I managed worked a completely different schedule than I did, due to class hours. He was consistently late on his projects and deliverables. So I asked him to start giving me a rundown of the projects he worked on during his shifts. I explained it just as a “I worked on projects X, Y, and Z. I’m almost done with X and Y, Z will be a little longer because of Reason. I will connect with client for project K on Tuesday.” Really brief and standard status updates.

He responded with malicious compliance and gave me essentially a minute by minute reporting of what he did during his shift. Obviously trying to overwhelm me with detail so I’d stop asking.

I responded – yes perfect. More of that. And just made him give me that level of detail for a week. I did finally catch him and tell him to knock it off and give me the correct level of detail. But I let him make himself miserable with his own “malicious compliance” for a week first.

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{ 273 comments }

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  1. Aggretsuko*

    “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.”

    Well, what did Dan expect? That’s exactly what he was going for, wasn’t it?

    1. Snax*

      (I’m OP#3) Yeah, Dan was a nasty piece of work. I don’t even remember feeling malicious compliance-ly smug about this at the time – it was my first real job, and I was just trying to do Exactly As Instructed. His reign of terror really warped my sense of normal workplace culture for a while.

      Bonus Dan story: He’d also steal food out of your hand while you were talking to him (ie over lunch, he’d reach across the table and eat off your plate). My coworkers and I might’ve fed him like two pounds of sugar-free gummy bears by pretending to eat them ourselves, and letting him swipe fistfuls at a time. Sugar-free candy is… a ferocious laxative. That was not so much compliance as just malicious ;)

      1. SHEILA, the co-host*

        Dan sucks. And also, if you’ve never read the reviews of the Haribo sugar-free gummy bears on Amazon, it is well worth your time (assuming they haven’t purged all the funny reviews).

        3. Jamoche*

          Good news! Although Amazon is going to crack down on frivolous reviews in the future, they’ve said they’re not removing old ones. Gummi bears, tuscan milk, and three wolf t-shirts are safe!

      4. Al*

        Wow, this is horrible for anyone, but stealing food from a type 1 diabetic is legit evil. Y’all have much more definite food requirements.

      5. Watry*

        I’m also T1D on an insulin pump, and your story made me so happy. I’m going to share it with all my friends.

    2. LaminarFlow*

      Dan’s story reminds me of senior year in college. My friend Jake had a rare form of brain cancer. Jake is very intelligent, and he somehow managed to not miss a lot of clsss, so his grades didn’t suffer at all.

      The professor of one of our smaller classes thought hats were inappropriate to wear during class because they are disrespectful (ummm…it’s college, bro? Calm down).

      Jake had his hat on in the classroom of this particular professor, and the professor went ballistic. When he demanded a reason for the offensive in-class hat wearing, Jake removed that hat to his bald grandeur, and apologized for having brain cancer. He also mentioned that he was pretty cold, hence the multiple layers in spring, but it’s just brain cancer, so he was sincerely sorry for being in the wrong.

      Professor never spoke a word to Jake after that. Jake also never completed another assignment, but got a 4.0 in the class.

  2. Wow*

    I am torn. I adore all those examples of malicious compliance, but cannot shake off the thoughts how disappointingly bad some of those managers are.

    1. Pastor Petty Labelle*

      Good managers don’t invoke the need for malicious compliance. Because only unreasonable boss invoke unreasonable adherence to policies instead of reasonable accomodations.

      1. A Simple Narwhal*

        I love Captain Awkward’s “reasons are for reasonable people”, I think it translates well to “reasonable adherence is for reasonable bosses”.

      2. Tau*

        Honestly, if you jump to malicious compliance with a good boss, you’re just… being a bad employee. Good bosses *want* you to push back where it makes sense and point out when what they’re asking you to do has a nonsensical or almost certainly unintended outcome.

        I did the opposite of malicious compliance at one point at a previous job. There was a Very Important Feature that Had To Be Delivered by a certain deadline (I was never clear on *why* this deadline was so crucial, but it was definitely something along the lines of “we’d like to tell our big funder at our next demo that we’ve shipped it” and not contractual violations or customers relying on it showing up). A coworker and I got pushed into overtime to work on this thing. It was a very intricate, complex feature with some really awful consequences for the customer data if we screwed up anywhere, and we absolutely didn’t have the time we really needed for it. It was already becoming clear we’d have to skip any proper testing/QA phase for it, which management said they were willing to accept to get it done.

        Coworker and I worked on it, realised more and more how damn risky what we were working on was and how much work was still needed (and how a bunch of bad-tempered software developers who’ve been pressured into weekend work write significantly worse code than software developers who’ve had the chance to actually unplug and recover), and basically looked at each other and went “there is no way we can get this safe by the deadline”. So we went to the project manager and told him: “Look. If you insist that we push to ship this by this date, we can do that. However, as professionals in the area who is deeply familiar with what this change entails, we have to tell you: at the moment, we estimate that if we do so, we have an about 20-30% chance that all of our customers will lose all their current data with no chance of recovery. Do you still want us to go through with this?”

        The project manager went pretty much dead white at this point and said that no, that wasn’t a risk they were willing to run. The feature didn’t end up getting shipped by the deadline, the company survived, and we got a significant apology from our boss for having pressured us into (illegal, pretty sure actually) overtime.

        If, after giving them that warning, they’d told us to go full steam ahead – at that point yeah, going through with it and giving them exactly the untested buggy code they asked for would’ve been malicious compliance, and absolutely deserved. But I knew these people were generally pretty reasonable, and I knew that they *cannot* accurately assess the technical complexity and risks involved in pushing out a feature like this and so consider it part of my professional responsibility to provide that insight. If I’d just written the code as asked for and let things blow up without any protest… you could call that malicious compliance, but I’d call it being bad at your job.

        1. MigraineMonth*

          Exactly this. Malicious compliance has a very specific niche; outside of that, it’s actually something else.

          If you understand the spirit of the rule and know your management is reasonable enough to want you to follow the spirit of the rule but you decide to follow the letter of it instead, that’s insubordination.

          If you have a moral or professional duty to refuse to do something and do it anyway because you’re exactly following orders… that’s a violation of your moral or professional ethics.

          I think malicious compliance should only be pulled out when:
          – management is being unreasonable about an unreasonable rule
          – you are teaching someone the importance of clarity in instructions
          – it is part of a “work to rule” slowdown or similar collective union action
          – it is an effective way to resist carrying out unethical or dangerous orders
          – you are a small child learning logic and therefore a natural rules lawyer

          1. Spooz*

            I would add that malicious compliance ensures that the greatest consequences are felt by the fool who is insisting on the unreasonable thing being done by the first place.

        3. Despachito*

          Perfect distinction. You are spot on. Malicious compliance is the last resort when dealing with unreasonable (and possibly vindictive) people, otherwise it is bad work on your part.

      3. Wow*

        Absolutely! I was expecting bad, but the sheer amount of micromanagement, condescension and unnecessary rules were a bit overwhelming. I am still angry at no 3 and no 7

      4. Bruce*

        I was looking at #7 about the ER visit… when one of my staff fainted at the company picnic I had no worries about taking him to the hospital and waiting until his son showed up, the only thing I worried about was later making sure HR knew he had not been drinking to excess (he was dehydrated, it was hot, and I knew he’d only had _part_ of a _small_ glass of champagne). Then when covid happened my boss has bent over backwards to accommodate a peer who has been suffering with long covid. So I feel good about my part of the organization…

    2. Jillian with a J dammit*

      Some of them are just bad, but I suspect that many of them have had very little (if any) training. Without training, unless you have a very good mentor, you’re going to make a lot of bad decisions and never really understand why you have so many unhappy employees. In any job I’ve had, many people are hired/promoted and then thrown to the wolves.

      1. hbc*

        Honestly, I think it’s people who are reactionary and not good forward thinkers, and I’ve never seen management training that covers that (besides goal settings and the like.) You don’t need training to figure out that a CEO doesn’t have the time for approving POs on the time-scale needed, or that you’re unlikely to find a spending problem by seeing every pen request in real-time. You don’t need training to recognize that whining about a couple of hours lost from someone who regularly works 55 hour weeks is not a good choice, or that putting your foot down about time-wasting can wait until you have an incident not involving health and safety.

  3. WellRed*

    I’m just as delighted rereading about the Easter receipts. It’s so, so easy for managers not to be a petty, power hungry douche.

    1. Ama*

      I admire the OP’s self control to give her bosses every chance to let her explain but not actually say it since they kept telling her they didn’t want to hear it. I know I would have just blurted out “it was Easter – we weren’t open.”

      Also dumb: the managers were so sure OP was responsible but clearly hadn’t actually checked the schedule to see who was working that day (since the schedule would have shown the closure). Before the reveal I thought it was going to be that OP had swapped their shift and wasn’t even in that day (which was partly the case).

      1. HonorBox*

        I was really eager for OP to blurt out the Easter fact, but the way it was revealed was so much better. I love that the managers both had to write apologies.

        1. Elle*

          On first read, I thought each manager had written an apology, but then I realized it’s an ambiguous sentence. It may have been the case that both managers signed a single apology. Slightly less satisfying lol.

        1. RCB*

          I wonder if maybe OP worked that day doing inventory or cleaning or something even though the store was closed? They seemed so sure that she was working that day and OP didn’t seem to indicate that they weren’t working that day, so maybe that’s what happened, they were in fact working, which is where the confusion came in, but since the store was closed then obviously there were no sales that day. This was such a satisfying comeuppance her managers got.

        2. Easter OP*

          Sorry, this isn’t worded the best. The store was completely closed, no one worked that day – not even the 2 managers who were CERTAIN that I had worked.

          There was a ton of disfunction at this place; the CEO was completely oblivious to what was trending at the time, and I worked there at the height of the “Pinterest Board Wedding Era”. We had no store manager, so the ASM was acting as such and was wildly unprepared. I was trying to pick up whatever slack I could (ie – doing her job and my own) while she hid in the bathroom and made several attempts to make me look bad.

          I left shortly after Easter-gate, but about 6 months later got a call from a friend who still worked there. They’d learned that morning that as of 6pm the following day, the company would be closing all its locations and online retail store.

    2. goddessoftransitory*

      I beamed like sunshine reading that one. The poster gave them every chance not to hang themselves, but they were too busy rope shopping.

    3. Bryce*

      I had an insurance meeting on the 20th this month (routine stuff, not urgent). Hit the link at the assigned time, “no meeting exists”. Call in, no answer. They’d accidentally scheduled it for MLK day (a holiday, for non-USians) and so cancelled the error without telling me or rescheduling. Honestly I hadn’t noticed either until last week, but I had just figured if they were that busy I could make time for them.

  4. NMitford*

    The “turkey sandwich with everything” story reminds of a friend from college who worked in an ice cream shop in a beach destination over the summer. Somewhere on the menu, it stated how many ounces of ice cream were in a sundae or something. The staff routinely overscooped a bit for everything, so customers got a bit extra for their money. It was easier than measuring it every time, KWIM, especially on a busy day in the shop. Apparently, it was busy every day in the summer.

    One day he had a particularly unpleasant regular customer who was convinved he was shorting her on the amount of ice cream he’d put in her dish as he prepared her sundae before adding all the toppings and such. So, he got out the scale they never used, weighed an empty dish, weighed her dish with ice cream in it, and compute that her sundae was about six ounces over. He left the dish on the scale and started scooping ice cream out of it and dumping it in the sink, spoon by spoon, until the scale showed the advertised amount of ounces.

    She never complained again.

    2. Le le lemon*

      Haha! My first job was at an ice cream store, and they did train us to scoop perfect 70g scoops, but yes. If we could pack extra on, or you were kind to us, we did!

    4. Bruce*

      Whoa, 6 ounces is a noticeable amount! And I grew up in a beach town, I can imagine how busy they were :-)

    5. linger*

      Isn’t #8 the sandwich shop version of the old joke about a Buddhist at a hot dog stand?
      (Whose simple yet heartfelt request was, “Make me one with everything”.)

      1. Morgan*

        The vendor hands them a hot dog and the Buddhist pays with $50. After a moment the Buddhist asks, “where’s my change?” The vendor replies, “change must come from within.”

    6. Ant*

      Your story reminds me of one I read online about someone who worked at a diner that had a customer come in and order a sundae, and for some reason instead of requesting a sundae with no cherries on top, he requested a sundae, but “86 the cherries”. 86-ing is a food prep term for an ingredient no longer being available, and is used to refer to things being removed from menus or dishes. However, the staff there weren’t chefs… they were bored college kids who had no idea what 86-ing meant. So they put 86 cherries on his sundae.

    1. Shhh*

      The thing to do would’ve been to book it so he got to the shipyard on time but started traveling however many days before.

      1. Kay Tee*

        This, and expense hotel and meals all along the way! As it is, since he didn’t arrive on time, it doesn’t sound like he actually “complied” with the policy. Unless his lateness was due to a flight delay?

        1. JMR*

          Yeah, that confused me too. I think malicious compliance would have been booking all the extra flights, spending three days travelling and expensing all your food and accommodations, all while racking up thousands of extra airline miles.

        2. Formerly in HR*

          I think the OP is saying that, when they got notice of travel for work, they had to book the cheapest flights. But, as the reason for travel could require them to get from point A to point B the fastest way possible (e.g. before the ship that has to be repaired leaves again), they would book the fastest flights (also given how much noticed of travel they got), even if they were not the cheapest and mark that the business need (to fix the sheep) prevented them form abiding to the policy. The person in the example showed what happens when booking the cheapest flights – one gets to the destination, but the reason for travel is no longer valid (and, in this case, not only did they waste money on travel and three day’s worth of salary/ overtime/per diems, but they also missed repairing the ship, which could cause bigger issues down the road).

            1. Nah*

              Come on down to Ask A Manager, we’ve got hocolate teapots, llama grooming, and are now happy to announce we’re offering sheep repair!

        3. Nebula*

          I thought it was probably flight delays or something, yeah. Because if you book the cheapest flights with that many transfers, to actually get there on time, everything has to go perfectly. I think he was probably just intending to get paid for three days of travel and no work, and then the fact the ship had already left by the time he got there was a bonus.

    2. Mouse named Anon*

      Once my husband was booking flights from Miami to Seattle. One of the options given was to fly to Miami -> JFK -> London/Heathrow-> Dallas -> Seattle. This was like 14 years ago and we still laugh about it.

      2. MarsJenkar*

        I saw the “London/Heathrow” stop and I heard “One of these things is not like the others” playing in my head.

      3. Business Pigeon*

        And I thought the cheap flights I keep seeing lately that always want to send me (from the States) to Copenhagen and then back to Brussels were bad!

      4. Jamoche*

        Sales had an unhappy customer and wanted me to take the first available flight from San Jose CA to Des Moines. It would’ve left in the early afternoon, had a long layover in Chicago, and would’ve got in around 2AM if I was lucky (O’Hare is the home of frequent wind-related delays).

        Lucky for me, I had to spend the whole afternoon configuring a laptop to take with me (it was the 90s, it was a wild place). Also I’d managed to solve that problem while waiting for floppy disks to install, but Sales still sent me as a goodwill gesture to fix any other random bugs they might have. So I ended up taking a non-stop flight the next day at a perfectly reasonable time.

      5. Bryce*

        Not that bad, but when my dad died my brother had to get the soonest flight still available out there regardless. The trip bounced across the US north and south three or four times and took all day.

      6. Freya*

        I once saw a flight where it was cheaper to fly Canberra -> Melbourne -> Sydney -> Gold Coast than Canberra -> Sydney -> Gold Coast, where the Sydney -> Gold Coast leg was the same on both flight plans.

        1. Cathy with the Yarn*

          I was on a flight from Detroit to Philadelphia, where the plane continued on to (I think) Wilmington, DE. The Detroit->Wilmington flight was cheaper than the Detroit->Philadelphia even though you sat in the same seat on the same airplane for longer. (There was some bit of bureaucracy that stopped me from booking the flight to Wilmington and just getting off in Philadelphia, though.)

      7. LadyVet*

        That sounds like how NYC Mayor Eric Adams was allegedly flying through Istanbul to get anywhere else.

  6. Juicebox Hero*

    I said it before, and I’ll say it again: as a fellow survivor of retail and clueless, shitty managers, the bridal shop story warms the shrivelled little dead remnants of my heart.

    1. Dry Cleaning Enthusiast*

      to paraphrase the saying elsewhere in the comments, Easters are for reasonable people.

    3. ScruffyInternHerder*

      Laughs in “well, Ms District Manager, I didn’t refund the complaining customer’s purchase on her Diner’s Club CC because we don’t accept Diner’s Club CCs….”

      The complaining customer was a manager of another store in the facility. She should have known better than to escalate something like this (with an obvious explanation) to my DM.

    4. nonprofit llama groomer*

      Same! I was in high school working for f-ing Montgomery Ward at the mall (I’m old) children’s department in the mid to late 1980s. We had to go through training on our new computer system and were allowed to wear clothes that didn’t comply with required retail floor wear. My manager paged me up to the floor during the training, about 1/2 hour before my floor shift, interrupting the mandatory training, because he heard I was wearing sneakers. I threw on my loafers before I ran upstairs. He was livid that I’d changed shoes! I’m like, dude, I’m in high school, this isn’t my career, I’m going to college a year from now.

  7. H3llifIknow*

    Oh #13, I wish I could have found a way to engage malicious compliance with a former 3 letter auditing company (that you may know from a famous Oscar’s SNAFU). I was traveling on gov business to Florida. The cute guy at the rental counter says, “I’ll upgrade you to a convertible mustang–same price. Enjoy the sunshine!” (My state, not so sunny). I file my expense report and get told they will not reimburse my rental! Why? “Mustangs use more gas than a compact car, so even though the same price, gas cost more.” I say, “ok, I’ll eat the cost of the gas.” Nope. They disallowed the entire ~$300 rental. I was livid. My gov client even emailed and said, “we are perfectly okay with reimbursing this; it’s fine,” but auditors are notoriously anal and they wore me down until I gave up….And then a similar situation happened. I was flying out of a major airport at around 1030pm, and arrived around 830 to turn in my car. I hadn’t seen a gas station in about 10 miles. Drove around a while, couldn’t find one, and finally said “whatever, I’ll just pay for them to fill the tank.” It was $25–perfectly reasonable, and in the dark, in a pretty industrial and sketchy part of town where the rental car terminal was, I wasn’t going to keep driving around so it seemed safe and fair to me! But again, “we don’t reimburse if the rental agency fills it up because you didn’t.” “But, it was late at night, I couldn’t find a gas station within 10 miles, blah blah.” “We don’t care.” I finally said I’d eat the $25….and began looking for another job. I quit about 3 weeks later. Don’t miss that hellscape of a company AT ALL.

    2. I take tea*

      That’s a Guacamole Bob level of pettiness audit. So stupid. It will cost much more to handle the overturn of people. I’m glad you are out and I hope you have a better job now.

      1. H3llifIknow*

        Thank you! I do!! And WITHOUT the extra ~400 hours “over standard” plus X business brought in, recruiting, BD and marketing metrics to get my whopping $10K annual bonus. Now I make ~40% more and without all that nonsense. Sooooo much happier! :)

      2. Dancing Otter*

        The big audit firms EXPECT turnover. They balance their audit budgets on using baby auditors straight out of school. They don’t WANT all those juniors to stick around. Either you succeed in leveling up, or you’re managed out. And they don’t need as many seniors as juniors, so many of the juniors aren’t going to make the grade. If people quit on their own, too bad, so sad, at least there are that many less to out-place.

        1. lanfy*

          What they don’t realise is that the people who wise up fast and have external options are the good ones. They’re selecting for bad employees.

          I’m reminded of the place I worked that basically maliciously complied with the law in order to get rid of the specific employees we all knew they wanted to. This required that they let the rest of us in those roles know that our jobs were at risk.

          You should have seen the shocked Pikachu faces when half their best employees handed in their notices at about the same time. Apparently it never occurred to them that we might have opinions and independent action.

          1. AtoZ*

            I think they actually do realize it – those good people that leave go on to be senior at various companies and hire the big 4 firm they were with for consulting work if they aren’t that company’s auditors.

    1. MsM*

      I do hope that doctor’s not still doctoring anywhere they need to interact with people who need antidepressants, though.

      1. MigraineMonth*

        Yeah, and how did the company know about a 20 year old mental health prescription? That’s the kind of thing that isn’t supposed to get shared without explicit permission, which OP says they didn’t give.

        1. Ama*

          I kind of thought the implication was that the doctor had taken their own initiative to pull full medical records. (Unclear whether they *knew* they weren’t supposed to pull those records or misrepresented themselves in order to do so- that doctor seemed to have a very skewed idea of what their job actually was.)

          1. The unskippable cutscene*

            (Hi, OP 12 here) Yep, that’s basically what happened – I had signed a release of info with my GP when I had to get cleared to go back in the field after a (non-work related) injury, but it was JUST for that clearance, it shouldn’t have been applied for the annual physical.

    2. Emotional Support Capybara*

      “And then I became an unskippable cutscene” took me OUT. 1000000/10 no notes.

      2. MigraineMonth*

        AMAZING!

        As someone who plays videogames but isn’t actually that good at them, WHY would anyone put a long unskippable cut scene before a difficult boss fight? WHY??

    3. Lyudie*

      I was put on Zoloft a few years ago and also had those side effects so as soon as I saw the name of the drug, I knew this one was going to be good.

  9. The Wizard Rincewind*

    I was just reminded that my first job as a teacher’s aide at a tutoring center, and our closing duties, in addition to cleaning/resetting all the rooms, included pulling all the lesson plans and materials for the first 2-3 students of the following day for each tutor (there were about 8 tutors on any given day).

    One day, I suppose it was really slow because I was flying through my usual duties. Come closing time, I was way ahead of schedule so by the time I had completed the strict parameters for closing, I still had 30-ish minutes left on my shift. I asked my boss, a wildly unreasonable person who, about a month after this story, would be the reason I quit on the spot, if I could go home early.

    Oh, no. That wouldn’t do. If you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean.

    I re-wiped down all the desks. I cleaned the windows. I sharpened every single pencil in the building. I pulled lesson plans for EVERY student for the next day. I can’t imagine what the opening teacher’s aide the next day must have thought. But I absolutely could not leave half an hour early and I absolutely could not, for a second, be unoccupied. It’s not quite malicious compliance, but boy, did I ever feel malicious about it at the time.

    And yes, this extra work did go completely unremarked upon by my boss. She was the worst boss I’ve ever had, hands down, and I only worked with her for three months.

      1. The Wizard Rincewind*

        A lot of it was death-by-a-thousand-cuts. I’d been doing this job just fine for almost a year, with nothing but praise from my bosses, and then this lady was hired as a co-director and it all went downhill. This woman was just a straight-up misogynist. All of the TAs (myself included) were high school girls and she treated us like we were morons. Here’s the main story:

        So, we (the TAs) got reamed out for being terrible at our jobs. We lacked customer service skills, we were inefficient (and yes, this criticism DID come after the story I just told!), we were just all-around bad. This was news to all of us, but we came in on a holiday Monday so we could be re-trained by the “rockstar TAs” from her former center.

        The rockstar TAs were two college-aged men and they were utterly useless but acted like they were doing us a big favor. They didn’t know anything about our tutors/students and tried to suggest changes that ranged from pointless (rearranging seating charts…which is not in a TA’s purview at all) to dumb (they tried to clear out our calculus study materials and were shocked to hear that we actually had calculus students). They gave us zero feedback on phone skills or any skills at all. I might as well have stared at a wall for three hours.

        So yeah, that was the standard we were failing to meet. After the “re-training,” I noticed that I was getting fewer and fewer hours on the schedule. When I asked why, Horrible Boss said that the training had clearly not worked, and she didn’t have time to re-re-train me.

        I was vaguely aware of the concept of a two weeks’ notice, and I wasn’t on the schedule for the next two weeks anyway, so I got a piece of notebook paper, wrote “To Whom It May Concern: This is my two weeks’ notice. Thank you, [Rincewind]”, dropped it on my other boss’s desk, and bounced.

        1. Bird names*

          Wow, she certainly seems to be the typical example of a boss who nitpicks other to pieces, because she has no actual clue how to evaluate people properly, or, you know, do her job.
          I’m glad you acted immediately after her insulting reply. You can certainly be proud of younger you for that even if it might not have felt that great in the moment.

          1. Merrie*

            I’ve got one of those right now! Most recently she gave my work bestie a hard time for how many orders he had verified in a particular day (we’re all pharmacists). 1. he is one of the most experienced people on our team and could easily quit and go elsewhere, do you really want to antagonize him? 2. some orders require far more time and attention than others so unless you know exactly what orders he worked on, it’s a useless comparison, 3. she couldn’t even say which particular day this was an issue, so he didn’t have a way to look back at that day and say anything about what had happened (and most times she calls us out for something, it’s very vague and poorly specified like this so we don’t have the ability to tell our side).

    2. Bird names*

      I’m sorry about your Ex-boss. I can understand why Unseen University seemed a better choice afterwards.

      1. run mad; don't faint*

        I’m just surprised they didn’t solve this with a half brick in a sock.

        (In case anyone hasn’t read Terry Pratchett, Rincewind the wizard saves the world by knocking someone out with a half brick in a sock. And he takes on monsters with sand in a sock…He’s not much of a wizard, but he does know how to use a sock in a pinch.)

        1. engineeringTemp*

          He knows one spell! He just can’t use it, or remember it, and maybe that’s for the best?

        2. Vimes*

          Attacking people with a half brick in a sock is a violation of City Ordinance 728: Creating a Bloody Nuisance for the Watch.

          That is all.

  10. A Simple Narwhal*

    “I was so far over it I had broken through the atmosphere into a peaceful void of zen and mild heat exhaustion.”

    Pure poetry #12, *chef’s kiss

    1. Daughter of Ada and Grace*

      “And then I became an unskippable cutscene.”

      #12, you are a very talented writer.

      1. Airy*

        I’m pretty sure this originated from or at least was popularised by an AITA post on Reddit, a teenager describing how her parents couldn’t stop her saying everything she’d planned to say in a family therapy session. That’s the first place I encountered it and a lot of people in the comments were saying what a novel and clever turn of phrase it was. Of course, she could have heard or read it somewhere earlier; either way, it deserves to be used!

        1. The unskippable cutscene*

          Hi OP 12 here -Oh yeah, I definitely swiped the unskippable cutscene from somewhere, I can’t remember if it was Reddit or if I’d seen it repeated elsewhere.

  11. HonorBox*

    #3 I’m a fellow T1D. I also understand the difference between warnings, and I applaud you for leaning into it so far. For those who aren’t familiar, those beeps aren’t really … subtle. So the fact that you plowed through your presentation is remarkable. And I can’t believe people didn’t stop you at some point because, whoa horsey, is that hard to sit through.

  12. Dry Cleaning Enthusiast*

    It might be a little gory, but if anyone’s looking for a good username, Kiosk Vomiter seems to be available.

  13. KateM*

    #2 What is a jacket in this context? I thought it was something that one always wore over something, like a dress shirt. Or was that the point of t-shirt – that there was not something fancy underneath?

    1. Rainy*

      It sounds more like a long-sleeved smock. It sounds like you’re thinking jacket == blazer/suit jacket, but that’s pretty clearly not what this is. Think closer to a lab coat.

      1. AnReAr*

        I’m also a little confused and that still doesn’t help. In my experience lab coats are also always worn over something, even moreso than a jacket, because you’re expected to take a lab coat off and leave it unbuttoned more often than a regular jacket. Honestly I’d class them as jackets.

        I’m from the US, and in my region the important part of the definition of a jacket for this discussion is that it’s always a secondary article of clothing, to be removable in public if needed. They’re mostly lightweight coats, but can be for fashion. Wearing an oversized button up long sleeve shirt grunge style over at tshirt is to use it as a jacket.

        I suspect this is a translation issue of some kind? Like how German doesn’t actually have an equivalent for the phrase “given/individual name”/”middle name” different than the direct translation of “first name”? Or maybe this is just a Commonwealth/UK/US English difference thing that I haven’t ever come across.

        1. Nah*

          At the drugstore I worked at, we got uniforms that were what I believe OP is describing, it’s kind of half polo, half chef’s jacket. so you could wear an undershirt/whatever clothes underneath, but it wasn’t uncommon in the summer for half the staff to just toss it over a bra and run to work.

          1. Rainy*

            Yeah, I worked in a chichi pet grooming shop when I was younger and one of the options was a hair-proof smock to put over a tee. I can’t stand the feel of that hair-proof nylon so I always wore it over a tee or a scrub top, but some of my coworkers just threw it over a sport bra in the summer, especially on days when we knew the AC wasn’t going to be able to keep up with all the dryers.

      2. H3llifIknow*

        Oh y’know that makes sense. In my head it was like those jackets that a lot of hotels have their front desk personnel wear since the OP said it was to look put together for clients. Now I’m not so sure….

    2. TeaCoziesRUs*

      I was thinking of a chef’s jacket – something that has a t-shirt underneath, but is never unbuttoned when facing customers.

  14. Rosie*

    No. 13, I’m glad you got your twenty bucks and interest back but please don’t use ChatGPT, it’s environmentally disastrous and based on theft.

    1. Danielle*

      I love this use of ChatGPT! It was brilliant for generating pages of fluff to sway some meddling bureaucrats.

    2. foureyedlibrarian*

      Agreed!

      It consumes a bunch of freshwater, it has a carbon footprint (burns fossil fuels and produces green house gases), uses a lot of electricity (a ChatGPT request consumes 10 times the electricity of a Google Search) and creates electronic waste (which can include mercury or lead).

      It also outsourced Kenyan laborers to help train it, only paying less than $2 an hour. Some workers also developed PTSD from the kind of content they had to look at.

      1. Pocket Mouse*

        Foureyedlibrarian, I know your description here is brief and almost certainly leaves out a lot of additional impacts, but I want to thank you for sharing it. I haven’t yet had the motivation to look at the details of generative AI’s impacts, and I appreciate you giving a solid taste (with a very relevant comparison, even!) here.

      2. Annie*

        Wait, is this serious? ChatGPT has a bigger carbon footprint, uses more electricity, and creates electronic waste? I’ve never heard this before, honestly.

    3. Arrietty*

      Can we not make individuals using assistive tools like ChatGPT (or plastic straws, or driving a petrol car rather than taking public transport) take the blame for climate change, when by far the majority of environmental pollution is as a result of commercial industry that everyone is equally contributing to supporting? It’s an extremely ableist attitude. AI consumes a lot of resources for sure, but one person writing a couple of letters isn’t even scratching the surface compared to industries like investment banking or cyber security.

      2. nonbeenary*

        I’m not sure I agree with labeling ChatGPT an “assistive tool,” especially when its output is so rife with hallucinations. There’s got to be a better way to accommodate people with cognitive and learning disabilities than the plagiarism-and-disinformation machine.

        1. Allegra*

          Specifically related to the workplace, ChatGPT has been found, for example, to actually discriminate against people with disabilities in job applications—there was a study about it that made some news. Generative AI does have potential to be a powerful assistive technology. But it feels extreme to compare it to plastic straws, for example, which are essential for people with some disabilities to be able to consume liquids without choking, getting infections, or injuring themselves. Using ChatGPT for nonessential tasks is…not that.

    4. Zona the Great*

      There is a time to have this discussion but for now, let’s enjoy the show. No need to tell people who were kind enough to share their stories that they were wrong.

      2. justcommenting*

        No one here has been particularly rude or mean though, just stating the issues, and the multifaceted harm of generative AI has been well documented now. If someone had a casual aside in their anecdote about say, littering or smoking inside a car with kids, pointing out the issue isn’t unwarranted as long as you’re respectful.

    5. T.N.H*

      This is silly. ChatGPT and other AI are incorporated into everyday work tools for many of us. Assuming she’s a regular user for work or similar, this extra instance does not make a difference. I hope every comment section doesn’t derail like this.

  15. Pippi*

    In my fantasy, the caller in #8 was an employee who wasn’t supposed to be the boss’s assistant but ended up being treated as one, and the boss told her to order him a sandwich with everything.

    1. Charlotte Lucas*

      I worked at. DQ in college, and we could make a blizzard out of many, many toppings. Once a guy came in and was very rude and insistent on “everything” in his blizzard. (Why, yes, there was an extra charge for over 3 toppings.) So, a coworker made the World’s Worst (and most expensive in 1991 dollars) Blizzard. And charged for it. Readers – it was grey and lumpy.

      The customer said it was terrible and ordered something normal. My coworker (who was 6’8″ and male) was able to convince him to pay for both orders.

      We also had orange Mr. Misty (slushy) that tasted like baby aspirin. If someone asked about it, we honestly told them. If they ordered anyway and complained about the flavor, we refused refunds. They had been warned. (We made a kind of shake with it that some people seemed to like. The dairy somehow mitigated the baby aspirin flavor.)

      1. Lady Lessa*

        The Orange plus milk shake sounds similar to Orange dream sicles that I remember from years ago. I think they even came in push up containers

    2. goddessoftransitory*

      I felt SO SEEN by that one! We once had a customer who insisted on a pizza “with everything.” (This was before my time, but it became legendary.)

      Understand, going by individual topping, we have about forty or so toppings. This person apparently absolutely refused to specify what toppings they wanted, simply insisting, rudely, on EVERYTHING. So, customer’s always right, right?

      The resulting pizza mound was a huge and lumpen thing that basically resembled the Horta from the original Star Trek and cost about ninety bucks in early 1990s dollars. The crew got reprimanded, but hey, it. had. everything.

    3. Snoozing not schmoozing*

      I want to know why the sandwich store didn’t have something on their menu describing what’s included in “the works” or “with everything.” It’s rude to put the burden of figuring that out on the customer.

      1. Sandwich Slinger*

        Because that is not actually a menu item they offer, and if customers are going to go off-menu, the onus is on them to listen when told that “everything” is not actually an option. It’s rude of customers to refuse to listen, insist on ordering things that are not on the menu, and then complain!

        1. Antilles*

          Also, even if you do have a listing for what “everything” means, it still is going to get completely ignored. I worked in sandwich shops for several years in college and the secret of “with everything” is that every customer has their own idea of what “everything” entails (which is never actually “everything” by the way). Even if your menu clearly lists it, you still have customers come in all the time who ignore the menu definition and still say “with everything”, expecting you to psychically know that they actually mean their own definition of with everything not the menu definition.

          1. Little Bobby Tables*

            I once ordered a sandwich with everything, on purpose. I was hungry. And bored. Although I didn’t order every sauce, just every sort of vegetable they had on the sandwich counter.

      2. Insert Clever Name Here*

        That’s not how menus work. The shop is not rude for not listing every possible combination of toppings.

      3. H3llifIknow*

        Yeah I’m kinda with you, although if the caller was rude about it, I’d go with the MC. But to me “with everything” means the standard: O/V, lettuce, tomato, onion, pepper relish, with options for other things like olives, cucumber, etc… And “everything” on a pizza to me is “a supreme” so that’s what I would ring in. Unless the customer is looking at the menu, and realizes there are 40 options…. Meh. I’d have just said “so you want the standard toppings on a supreme” or something. BUT again, be rude and I would definitely go all MC on your ass.

        1. Cake or Death*

          That is not at all universal on “O/V, lettuce, tomato, onion, pepper relish” being the “standard” “With Everything”.

          “And “everything” on a pizza TO ME is “a supreme” so that’s what I would ring in.”

          Your entire comment is just your opinion. I can counter your assumptions with my own experience. There is no standard “with everything” because all places offer different options.

      4. Hyena*

        What? Maybe this is just me, I’m a person who checks the menu before I go anywhere to make sure I know what I’m ordering, but considering it “rude” and “a burden” on a customer to be aware of the options before spouting off an order the place might not even have is wild to me. You understand that different places have different items and processes, right? Surely it’s not that hard to specify the ingredients you want on a sandwich. “Everything” isn’t a precise descriptor of a few specific toppings, it’s EVERYTHING.

      5. Ace in the Hole*

        This was my story!

        The reason is because we didn’t have anything on the menu labeled “everything” or “the works.” We did have a variety of different sandwich options on the menu clearly labeled with the name/number of the sandwich and description of what came on it. The menu also had a “build your own” option that showed the entire list of meats, cheeses, veggies, and condiments to choose from.

        I don’t see how it’s rude to ask a customer to look at the list of options and tell you what they want on their sandwich. That’s literally how most sandwich shops work.

  16. Allegra*

    Ah, #10. You can’t win in retail when someplace Must Be Staffed. One time I was working the kiosk at Big Chain Bookstore and someone came in with their kid needing to find summer reading books. The kiosk had to be staffed, so I paged a colleague who came over took them to the right section. A few minutes after that I rotated to the register when the same customer came back and asked for help with something else. You also cannot leave the registers unstaffed, so I again flagged a coworker down and they took this person to find what they needed.

    After that this customer came back to the register and berated me for five solid minutes for not leaving the kiosk or register to personally help them with their requests. A very kind more senior colleague came and diverted them, and when it was apparent I was on the verge of tears told me he’d cover the register for the last five minutes of my shift. (But after crying in the breakroom I still had to go explain to our (unsympathetic) floor manager before I could clock out why this person made a complaint to them about me.)

    1. PokemonGoToThePolls*

      I remember the eReader kiosks in the Big Box Book Store and how, for a brief time when they were sure it was their way to beat Amazon, they could not be left unmanned. As the resident eReader person, there were only so many times you could clean that counter on a slow Monday in February so I got through several books on the demo device during my shift (eventually they did let us shelve and help out at the customer service desk which was so much more engaging and less demoralizing)

    2. Archi-detect*

      you should have cloned yourself and sent the clone to help her- one salary for both of course! -y0ur manager probably

    3. Charlotte Lucas*

      There’s a special place in Hell for people who complain about retail staff when they’re following store protocol.

      I once got reprimanded because someone complained that I was “rude” to her. She had shouted across the store to me asking where our bathroom was while I was at the register helping other, paying customers. I directed her to the mall bathroom (as politely as I could from over 20 feet away). And she wanted to know where I went to the bathroom, so I had to tell her that our bathroom was for employees only (insurance and safety reasons). When I explained that the woman was just mad that I wouldn’t let her use our bathroom and the rude one to people in line, I was told “Just to think about how people perceived me.” (Spoiler alert: I was known for my politeness and she was known to be very rude and abrupt herself. And she was eventually fired.)

      1. Chirpy*

        THIS. I have been asked by SO MANY customers to “just give them a deal” and mark down merchandise (or mark it down *further*, one guy regularly argued over ten cents!) There are rules on how I can mark things down, I’m actually allowed to NOT mark them down (sometimes damaged items must be destroyed for safety) and no, I’m not risking my job because some customers are just cheap!

      2. Business Pigeon*

        A library patron complained about me for being “rude” and “dismissive.” I did in fact answer his question very shortly–but I was literally in the middle of helping someone else when he interrupted us. I thought I was more than generous by answering him at all. A lot of people just suck.

      3. Nah*

        I got yelled at by my manager during a rush in front of a mass of customers for not accepting an older woman’s coupons, after already being yelled at by the older woman for the solid ten minutes it took him to bother answering the call for a manager (this was a common and related issue. honestly I’m surprised he even showed up at all, a good 80% of the time none of the managers would bother), because the coupons were *two years out of date* and also for like forty dollars off! Store policy was no expired coupons ever (obviously), the cashier was on the hook for the lost money, and any till over three dollars removed from what it would have been was immediate termination and possibly a call to the police station for theft. I was an overwhelmed and poor teenager at the time and a good foot and a half shorter than this very angry manager yelling down at me for trying to keep my freaking job. 0/10 do not recommend.

  17. Raida*

    #11 The Flights

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

    Well… he sounds like a d*ckhead?
    He failed to arrive in time for the purpose of the travel – which must surely be required.
    He didn’t work (I’m assuming) for two, two and a half days while in transit – which wasn’t necessary.
    He didn’t use the simple, accessible, easy to use and understand, readily accepted function in the booking process to just pick a different flight that cost more.

    The policy and processes clearly allowed for staff to be trusted to make good decisions, and he decided to not even book the flights starting three days earlier to do his job.

    So… Unless this dude was trying to get himself a secretary because he’s too dumb to do paperwork and bookings himself… This really sounds like an own-goal.

    1. Orange Line Avenger*

      A lot of malicious compliance stories just make the teller look foolish. You’re not proving anything by slavishly adhering to a rule that’s not being enforced in a meaningful way, you’re just demonstrating yourself to be spiteful and lacking in common sense.

    2. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

      I figured he was trying to get time off by missing the boat (literally).

    3. Person from the Resume*

      I agree that he didn’t quite achieve the compliance part of malicious compliance.

      Malicious compliance is making the boat, but leaving 4 days early (so missing 4 day in the office in order to take the cheapest flight).

    4. Nameless*

      It sounds like the maintenance wasn’t pre-planned, so flights were only being booked very shortly before departure, so he couldn’t bake the travel time into his plans and there was a fundamental mismatch between the policy & priority. What I don’t get is what point he was trying to make. If other folks were able to submit as “outside of policy” with no repercussions it sounds like everything was working fine and the policy was applicable to other situations but not theirs

      1. amoeba*

        Yup. I’d get it if the department had denied his request to take a different flight, but as far as I get it, he was just… annoyed by the rule itself? Which, honestly, isn’t unreasonable at all, as long as you handle it flexibly enough when there’s actually a good reason to take a different flight.

    5. fhqwhgads*

      I think the premise was he was notified of the need to travel on, say, Monday. He was also told to book the cheapest flights available to the destination. A reasonable interpretation would be “the cheapest flights available to destination that will arrive in time to do the task”. But in an attempt to “show” the idiocy of the “cheapest” policy, he booked the cheapest flight available as when he notified of the need to go. Hence choosing the travel that left soonest, despite arriving too late (or possibly would’ve been a very close margin to be on time, but in the end was too late).
      It does make him look like an idiot unless his intention was to rules-lawyer the wording of the policy. But as you say, the policy already seemed to have existing exceptions, so unless the work of applying for said exception was onerous…he was not proving the point he seemed to think he was.

      1. Mango Freak*

        Yeah but the policy wasn’t idiotic–he was an idiot who chose to take the policy in a bizarrely literal way that wasn’t the case, and so he got to be on airplanes for days. Yay, I guess?

  18. Daisy-dog*

    Re: Sandwich with Everything

    My friend told me a story of her mom at Subway. She asked for “all the peppers” meaning some of each kind of pepper – bell, banana, jalapeno. The poor teen sandwich artist looked scared and asked, “*All* the peppers??” He motioned as if to pick up the entire container of peppers which would surely . She laughed and clarified it was for the normal amount of each, but definitely considered eating a pepper sandwich.

    2. umami*

      LOL! This reminds me of the time a colleague and I went to Subway to split a footlong sandwich. She had some special for it, and I said sure because I like everything. Except olives. And she looked at me horrified, wanting to know if I had an allergy or anything. I said no, just don’t care for them o my sandwich, but feel free to add them to your half. So she did. They added extra olives. And then more. And then she asked for even more. I mean, it was basically an olive sandwich, I thought they were going to have to go get more from the back!

  19. Lily Rowan*

    Argh, the Spanish speaker! I had one of those, which luckily we caught in the interview process. She said on her resume she was fluent in Spanish, having lived in Spain a bunch of years earlier. One of the people on the interview team was actually bilingual, so asked the interviewee some questions in Spanish, which she absolutely could not answer.

    2. MigraineMonth*

      I’m not saying that these individuals weren’t lying, but it seems like language ability is one of the skill that needs to be evaluated in an interview, since people seem to have a lot of different definitions for “fluent”. Able to travel in the country? Carry on a conversation? Read a newspaper? Have a technical discussion about [subject]? Read a book of law or write an argument for a judge?

      Not to mention, the skills needed for a translator, an interpreter, or someone who can just answer a few questions is wildly different.

      1. Zephy*

        100%. Especially if it’s an industry with a lot of specialized vocabulary, even someone who is native or near-native fluent in both languages can struggle; if you’ve never, for instance, counseled someone about borrowing a loan in your L2, there’s a LOT of VERY IMPORTANT information with VERY SPECIFIC words that have VERY SPECIFIC meanings involved. I don’t know when DuoLingo gets to that topic, but I’m almost 900 days into a German course and couldn’t begin to talk about any financial topic more complex than “do I pay here with cash or card?”

        1. Despachito*

          I seriously doubt DuoLingo EVER gets to that topic.

          The reason: there are so many areas of specializations and activities you have absolutely no chance to master them all EVEN IN YOUR OWN LANGUAGE. Trades, finance, law, medicine, sports all have their own specific lingo, and unless you work in that field it is very likely you will get that very specific meaning wrong or not understand it at all. Plus with English (and Spanish for that matter), there are VAST differences depending on the country you are in (for example different law systems in UK and US).

          So if you want to be absolutely honest, you couldn’t say you perfectly master even your own language. (Of course the girl from OP’s example failed the test regardless)

          1. Sack of Benevolent Trash Marsupials*

            This, this, this. Sometimes even if you don’t exaggerate to get a job, you can get pulled into situations where you are out of your depth if people find out you have some level of skill.

            I grew up speaking Spanish and have been reasonably fluent at several points in my life (like when I had a Spanish-only speaking roommate or was engaged to a Mexican guy), but I always got pulled into rooms when I worked as a vet tech to explain stuff to Spanish speaking clients and it was colossally embarrassing because I did NOT know the technical words for what was going to happen in their pet’s upcoming surgery or treatment.

            Which reminds me of my first job out of college at a law firm (long long ago), I was a legal assistant and one of the associates found out I was a Russian major. He spoke like three words of Russian so I seemed amazing to him I guess. Unbeknownst to me but apparently on the strength of my supposed Russian language prowess (I was never even close to fluent) he applied for an exchange program thing and our firm got the Deputy Director of the Supreme Soviet to come and talk about legal stuff around joint ventures with Russian businesses and I was expected to INTERPRET. A few days before the Russian guy was set to arrive I was told about this plan. I told them I absolutely could not do that and that they needed to hire an interpreter, but it went forward anyway.

            Needless to say it was a giant, totally humiliating disaster because I can’t talk about intellectual property law in English, let alone any other language. I totally bombed a huge meeting with the big big boss and a bunch of important partners. They hired an interpreter the next day.

            1. Despachito*

              Exactly.

              And add to this that interpreting is a SKILL that is taught in universities.

              You can of course be a natural talent or help out in a pinch but otherwise it is unrealistic to expect that a person who SPEAKS that language will be able to flawlessly INTERPRET during a meeting.

              1. Former Admin Turned PM*

                One of the bosses asked if I would be ready to become the ASL interpreter for our science volunteers, since I’d finished 3 non-credit ASL classes at the community college.

        2. LadyAmalthea*

          When I worked in an orthopedic shoe store, for a while we took Medicare, and I (at that point conversational enough in Spanish to speak with Spanish speaking customers well enough for most things) worked with some of my coworkers who were native Spanish speakers, and they couldn’t figure out how to translate instructions for Medicare Required Documentation into Spanish, either.

          1. TeaCoziesRUs*

            I wonder if this has changed in recent years? It seems like more and more of the government publications have versions in both English and Spanish. A few of them are printed in a dozen languages.

        3. Global Cat Herder*

          Reminds me of one particular “team building experience”. It was a global project with team members in many different countries, and we were coming together in Madrid to put together each of our pieces and deliver the final result. They thought since most people were in Spain for the first time, they would have a specialist come in and give a presentation about Spanish wines (with samples! at the office!)

          Since very few team members spoke Spanish, and the specialist didn’t speak English, they hired an interpreter. The presenter spoke very passionately for several minutes, waving the first bottle about and gesturing grandly. He apparently asks the interpreter why she hasn’t interpreted, and she finally says “he says it’s very good”. Seven different wines this man was intensely passionate about in great detail, followed by “he says it’s very good”.

          They hadn’t told this poor woman she would be interpreting for a wine demonstration and would need that particular vocabulary. (The wine samples we got were, indeed, very good.)

      2. Chirpy*

        Plus, translation is another skill entirely. At my most fluent, living in a Spanish speaking country and at the time able to understand most things (and fluent enough that I was dreaming in Spanish quite often) I still couldn’t switch between Spanish and English quickly enough to translate sentence by sentence for other people.

        And one reason I avoid translation at work now is largely because I don’t have the vocabulary to answer work-specific questions. That knowledge just wasn’t my focus in Spanish ever.

        1. tiny potato*

          I’m a translator and court interpreter between French and English, and I also speak decent Spanish, having minored in it in university. Work has asked me more than once if I wanted to interpret with Spanish. I could not *begin* to do that. (I once translated a document from Spanish to English in a pinch, but that was pushing it.)

          1. tiny potato*

            (To be clear, they were just asking and fine with my ‘no’ – the point is just to agree that speaking a language well doesn’t qualify you as an interpreter any more than having hands qualifies you as a pianist.)

      3. amoeba*

        Hah, that reminds me of the one time I actually got a “oh, let’s continue the rest of the interview in English”. Like, sure, fair enough, I guess I could be lying – however, our field is extremely international and, like, 90% of my position – and honestly, most, if not all similar positions at different companies – is done in English, anyways. Publications are written, talks are give, etc., etc. So basically doubting the fact that a candidate (with multiple years of experience outside the country, as well) was… a surprise.

        1. MigraineMonth*

          Finding out that many Computer Science PhD students in Germany *write their dissertations* in English blew my mind. I’m not sure I could do that, and English is my first language!

          Also, English as a second language has to suck. Yeah, sure, let’s mix a ton of French vocab into a language with Germanic grammar. Not complicated enough? Let’s just steal vocabulary from Greek and other random languages. Good luck with spelling that, folks!

      4. Emmy Noether*

        That’s why there are levels (A1 to C2). “Fluent” is at least C1 in my opinion, but I’d definitely ask to clarify. Level, as well as how they learned (in school is very different from immersion).

      5. Parakeet*

        Yeah, when I did hotline work, all “Spanish required” position interviews required the candidate to roleplay a hotline call in Spanish with a native Spanish speaker (of which we had a lot, because about 40% of the positions were “Spanish required”). Candidates weren’t told that this would be happening until we got to that part of the interview. The presumption was that if they were fluent enough to be talking to people who were in very sensitive crisis situations, they were fluent enough to do the roleplay without prior warning.

    3. crookedglasses*

      Yeah, if language skills are key for a role you’ve got to vet that in an interview. We always note it in the job description and then flag for candidates that one or two of the interview questions will be in Spanish. Happily we haven’t had too many folks bomb on that basis but it has happened once or twice.

      If we didn’t have folks already on staff who could meaningfully interview in Spanish, we’d use some kind of third party assessment. But I can’t imagine just taking a resume bullet point of “Conversational Spanish” or whatever at face value.

      1. fhqwhgads*

        The way I see this go wrong most frequently is when they’re hiring for an X-language speaker because they don’t have one at all. Of course, just like with tech skills, there are probably online assessment tools that could confirm for you, without the panel needing to speak the language personally. But somehow, if it’s the kind of office that needs only one person who is bilingual, they sort of overlook that completely normal step in hiring.

    4. RC*

      I presume it didn’t happen in this case because nepotism, but surely that is an easy thing to actually check/screen for in a normal interview process.

      1. Chocolate Teapot*

        Yes, any interview for a job I have done which requests French and German, I expect that all or part of the interview will be conducted in those languages.

    5. bamcheeks*

      I have been on the receiving end of, “We’re going to switch this interview to German now, because German is a requirement of the role”, and O, it was humbling.

  20. nora*

    I don’t think this counts but #13 reminds me of something that happened at my last job. I work for a gov agency so our expenses are scrutinized thoroughly. It’s not uncommon to have to submit multiple drafts of travel requests until you find the magic combination of figures that everyone will sign off on. It’s even harder when multiple people go to the same event, as I learned when I tried to register for a mandatory training.

    The training started at 8am about 2.5 hours from home in no traffic, in a city where “no traffic” meant a hurricane was blowing through. It also happens to be about 15 miles from where my in-laws live. I requested a rental car starting the day before so I could spend the night with my in-laws and not have to leave my house at 4am to hope I made it to the training on time. Since it was a two-day training, this also meant (a) not paying for a hotel room and (b) not paying for multiple meals.

    I thought that would more than offset the cost of an extra day of rental car use. And it did! But finance denied my request several times because they didn’t understand why my expense report looked so different from my coworker who decided to stay in a hotel. I submitted a detailed explanation, including maps. Denied. So I suddenly remembered I had a doctor’s appointment that absolutely could not be moved and skipped the whole thing.

    1. Artemesia*

      So many examples of idiocies in reimbursing travel — and we had such limits on what could be claimed in total dollars that being picky made no real sense. But my personal favorite was a receipt from McDonalds that was not itemized — maybe it was the cc receipt — but I could not be reimbursed without a detailed receipt showing that none of the 12 bucks had gone to buy alcohol. Last time I cheaped out with McDonalds — went to proper restaurants after that and got a full dinner appetizer and all.

    2. NotRealAnonForThis*

      At least in privately owned industry, I was able to explain why “I opted for a rental car in lieu of a hotel room because I spent two nights at my sibling’s home, which was 20 minutes from the office”. Granted, I had to explain it the the overall VP of my whole department, which seemed asinine (he agreed both with my decision and that it should not have been escalated to him), but there were never additional issues with it.

  21. CzechMate*

    LW 9 – Nonnative Spanish speaker here. In the daughter’s defense, it can be very hard to tell from a job posting what level of Spanish is actually needed for a role. I had a few instances in my early career where I wouldn’t apply for certain jobs thinking my Spanish wasn’t good enough, only to discover later that the job was filled by someone who didn’t speak ANY Spanish whatsoever. It had been more of a preference than a requirement, or there had been no applicants with any Spanish and so they had to make do.

    In the end, I ended up just applying for those jobs and decided that I’d leave it to the interviewers and employers to decide if I was up to par or not. That was how I ended up doing immigration forms processing for recent arrivals in a major US city. That was also how I discovered that you may think you’re fluent when you speak to, say, a Mexican immigrant, but then when you talk to someone from rural Colombia you suddenly aren’t…

    1. cosmicgorilla*

      I also find that folks that don’t speak the language, or haven’t studied a foreign language past the bare minimum required for school (US at least, I know other countries do better at language education) think that anyone who has studied for any significant period of time MUST be fluent.

      Um, no. I can get myself around a city, and I can have a simple conversation, usually with someone who is more educated and speaks something closer to my textbook vocabulary. But as CzechMate says, you get someone from a different country with a different accent, from a more rural area, or with different slang, or just with slang period…

      Maya Angelou has a funny bit in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings about trying to speak Spanish, and realizing her school Spanish probably sounded like “Whither goest my sire” or something like that to the folks she was trying to speak to.

      1. Not A Raccoon Keeper*

        I worked at a day program for adults with disabilities and mental illnesses in rural Quebec, *and* I’m a person who picks up slang and accents quickly without realizing it.

        I was bilingual with a prairie accent and a fairly formal French, but by the time I left town a few months later I was (according to my Quebecois roommates) speaking the equivalent of 1950s slang – keen, swell, golly gee, etc. They never made fun of my accent but they dang sure made fun of my word choices!

        1. Junior Assistant Peon*

          I had a tour guide in Paris tell me that he has a lot of trouble understanding French Canadian visitors. The dialect is very different from European French.

          1. Steve for Work Purposes*

            I learned French from my great-auntie who was Quebecois but who had spent several years living in Louisiana and so I picked up her accent. I have colleagues from France who say my vocabulary is fine, but my accent makes them cringe – apparently I sound like a total bogan. I’ve never had any problems the few times I’ve been to Quebec, my French is at the ‘moderately competent tourist’ level but I can get around and have basic conversations. But the time I went to France, it did not go over half as well as I was expecting, they’d hear the accent and immediately switch to English.

            1. Mad Scientist*

              Not surprising at all. My mom teaches French so I grew up learning it but I was mostly exposed to Caribbean and West African accents, and people from those areas usually understand me fine when I speak French (and I’ve never had trouble in Quebec either), but the last time I tried speaking French to someone from France, they responded (in English) “You said your mom teaches French? She must be so disappointed in you…”

          2. Jaunty Banana Hat I*

            Some Quebecois accents are SO HARD to understand for an average French speaker. I liken it to being an American English speaker trying to understand someone with an Irish or Scottish accent–mostly fine, and they can understand you, but some people’s accents are so thick you wish you could get subtitles.

            What I love is that apparently my French accent is usually very French, but I don’t look French at all (because I’m not), and I also have a tendency to take on the accents I hear without realizing it (exception being Quebecois, I cannot get my head around that accent for some reason; also, I do this in English, too, not just French, but I’m more aware of it in English), so I have routinely confused native French speakers in other countries. While on a trip in St.Martin, one of the waiters, who had heard me switching between French accents (for all the French speakers) and English (for my husband) for a week actually asked me on the last day we were there “WHERE ARE YOU FROM??”

        2. Zephy*

          Calls to mind a tumblr post about a user (possibly their friend) who was told by a Japanese professor, “Your pronunciation is great, but you need to stop watching movies about the Yakuza, you sound like a gangster.” Imagine if someone learned English by watching the Sopranos.

          1. Teapot Connoisseuse*

            On a similar note, a pal of mine I know through tea ceremony was telling me that his martial arts sensei had told him he spoke Japanese like a woman (which he attributed to studying tea in a predominantly female environment).

            1. PhyllisB*

              My brother in law was stationed in Japan and he had a nurse working with him who was told she spoke Japanese like a truck driver. That’s when I discovered there was a difference between male and female Japanese.

              1. linger*

                Yeah, there are register/politeness markers (including honorifics, and verb tense/aspect/voice forms) and speaker-gender markers (including pronoun forms [most stereotypically boku vs. atashi] and some vocabulary choices), but in practice they partly overlap, such that lower register Japanese also reads as “masculine”, and higher register Japanese also reads as “feminine”.

            2. Regina*

              That is actually a very common thing – since a lot of language teachers are women. On the other hand I am a woman and I got my whole office in Japan laughing at me when I asked “Shall we go to lunch now?” and used a word for lunch only men use – since that was what all my male coworkers had been using. They even brought that up at my farewell party four years later because it sounded so funny to them.

        3. tiny potato*

          I moved to Quebec as a teen from another province, where I had been taught largely French French (because it definitely makes sense to teach children an official language of their country as spoken in a different country). It was…pretty embarrassing, as you describe—I didn’t just sound like I was from the 70s, but from a severely uncool version of the 70s in France. Not a recipe for social and romantic success in 1990s Montreal! (I later increased my fluency by, among other things, reading the news daily, which in turn left me speaking like a Radio-Canada anchorperson. I’m better now.)

          1. tiny potato*

            Oh and as for accents, I have climbed the ranks from “this person is clearly an English speaker, I should switch” to “this person is clearly an English speaker, but they don’t seem to need me to switch” to “*puzzled expression* …is this person from …New Brunswick?”

            1. M*

              I, quite categorically, don’t speak German. I do, however, have a pretty good ear for accents, and my *mother* not only speaks German, she speaks it with the distinctive regional accent her mother had. When we were travelling there when I was a teen, she very carefully drilled my brother and I on how to say “excuse me, I don’t speak German, do you speak English?” – the result being that absolutely no-one believed me when I said it, since I was delivering it in an accent that wasn’t likely to be taught.

              1. TeaCoziesRUs*

                I grew up mostly in the US – in various areas from the mid-Atlantic to Texas to out west – and spent a few years in Stuttgart, Germany as a YOUNG kid. I don’t remember much of the language now, although it does come back quickly, but I still speak it with the Stuttgart accent. I get to joke that it doesn’t matter if I’m speaking American or German… I tend to have a southern accent. :D

      2. Reb*

        I vastly overestimated my language ability when applying for a job. Half the interview was in Japanese. I thought, since I had taken four years of a Japanese class, that I could apply for it. Sure I’m not fluent, but I probably know enough to get by.

        I think it was going okay. Then there was The Sentence. I’d learnt the sentence “Out of X, which are you most good at?” and knew how to answer it. The interviewer asked “Out of reading/writing and speaking/listening, which are you most jishin?” I had zero clue what jishin was, I was trying to ask but couldn’t figure out how to specify which word I wasn’t understanding. It was so embarrassing. The interview ended very quickly from there.

        Found out later, jishin (自信) is self confidence. They just wanted to know if I was more confident with written or verbal communication. I still cringe thinking about it.

    2. learnedthehardway*

      Agreed – my kid is finishing high school in French Immersion and was pretty confident that he was fluent in French, until I pointed out that he’s likely at an intermediate level of French. (For one thing, I’m pretty sure they’re only just getting to the more complicated verb tenses now.)

      He didn’t know what he didn’t know – about French or his level of competency.

    3. Steve for Work Purposes*

      Yeah dialect can make all the difference too – I’m from South Florida, and most of the Spanish-speakers I knew growing up spoke Caribbean dialects of Spanish. And then in classes for my Spanish degree a lot of my instructors were from Spain or South America (esp Argentina and Colombia and Venezuela). I didn’t get much exposure to Mexican dialects til I started working part time as a translator in a legal office, and so I had to play catch-up. It can be very much ‘separated by a mutual language’ sometimes and you aren’t always aware until there’s a clash or a misunderstanding – like the time I realised the word “ahorita” has completely different meanings to someone from FL vs someone from New Mexico!

      1. RC*

        Now I’ve gotta ask: what other meaning is there for “ahorita” besides like, right now, right here real quick? Is it a cultural difference versus a really linguistic difference?

        My favorite are the really different slangs, like how “wawa” can be either baby or bus depending where you are. And then of course there’s the slang where “pico,” a totally normal word to use in many conversations, refers to certain genitals in other places. But I feel like that’s several steps ahead of where this particular new hire was.

        1. Ahoritaville*

          It is also used in some places to mean “later”, “when I get to it”, or “in ten minutes/an hour/whatever” – Mexican Spanish uses it both ways. Some Spanish-speaking countries have even more variety of meanings, including “in the recent past”, or “never”.

          Ahorita is complicated, and it very much depends on context which meaning is intended.

      2. RedinSC*

        Ha, my Spanish was learned in rural Bolivia. I got to grad school and the instructors were all from Spain. I remember barely passing the placement tests because

        “el cielo es azul” with that Spain accent was nearly impossible to understand!

        And then when they went to say “voy a coger el tren” I could not BELIEVE what they wanted to do to the train. NASTY! ha!

      3. Chirpy*

        Yeah, I struggled a bit to convert my American School Spanish to Spain Spanish…and now have so much trouble understanding Mexican Spanish/slang as a result of succeeding in acquiring a Spain accent…

    4. LadyAmalthea*

      Apparently, after years in NYC, I developed a Dominican accent when speaking Spanish. I do pretty well with most Western Hemisphere Spanish speakers except Argentinians, but I am LOST with people from Spain.

  22. No Soup for You*

    #1 I had a VP like that. We not only had to run every requisition through him, we had to explain what we needed the supplies for. I recall writing an essay about why we needed tape.

    1. Feral Humanist*

      I’m always astonished at how many organizations don’t realize that employee time costs money, and that if you force employees to spend time on trivial sh*t, you are LOSING MONEY. Way more money than you are saving in gratuitously ordered pens.

      I previously worked for a large state university with a bureaucracy so dense I believed it had become sentient and existed entirely apart from the human beings in it. For the last three years I was there, there was no time and leave system. Hours were reported via Excel spreadsheet. When I wanted to know my T&L balance, I had to email HR and ask someone to calculate it by hand. It took weeks to get a response, and I always thought about the poor person in HR who had to do this.

      I am sure there was a bureaucratic reason for this. They were probably trying to get the entire university system (~25 institutions of all stripes) on one T&L system, and procuring anything in the system was very hard because there were lots of safeguards for “fraud prevention,” it being a taxpayer funded institution (which always seemed laughable to me, given that city politics was pretty obviously rife with grift). But ultimately, it cost SO MUCH MONEY in the form of employee time. And that’s not even taking into account the employee I had who could not, COULD NOT, fill out his timesheet on time or correctly, no matter how many times I explained it to him (to the point where I eventually came to believe it to be weaponized incompetence, which I guess could be the flipside of malicious compliance).

      Anyway, I hope to never again work for a company that believes my time is worthless. Currently I’m a self-employed contractor, and believe you me, my clients know what my time is worth.

      1. Alan*

        I was once part of a 3-person effort to reimburse an employee < $30 for an expense they incurred. We burned hundreds (at least) of dollars to reimburse that $30, not even including the actual people doing the reimbursement. The 3 of us were solely fixed on how to justify it to satisfy auditors and accountants.

    2. Charlotte Lucas*

      Not supplies, but our VP of Systems once decided that all non-organizational websites would be blocked unless we sent her a request to unblock with a justification.

      We worked for a contractor to a federal health agency. And we ran off-site trainings for medical providers. My manager led both the outreach and the comms side of things (and she absolutely hated the VP) and directed us to forward any blocked websites to her with an explanation of why we needed them. I think she really delighted in sending lists of hotel, conference venue, and car rental sites, but my team often sent lists of sites that the federal government has asked us to share on listservs and our website, and we needed to verify links. Because CMS told us to.

      A few weeks later, they unblocked our Internet.

      1. Richard Hershberger*

        This is a variant of the Return To Office debate, where much of the drive to get butts in seats is upper management with no clue how else to assess productivity. In this case the assumption is that everyone will spend all day surfing the internet if given the capability, and the VP hadn’t the faintest idea how to tell if anyone was getting any work done.

        1. Charlotte Lucas*

          She wasn’t even our VP. She was over a completely different area. (Our VP also hated her and gave my manager her blessing on her malicious compliance plan).

          It also showed how little she understood how healthcare and the Internet worked together. AOL (remember them?) had briefly tried to block “inappropriate” sites, and there was an uproar from… medical professionals and patients. Because they blocked things like information about mammograms, etc.

    4. Bruce*

      In the 80s I joined a company that for years had a centralized “Action Item” system and to close an action item you had to write at least a short memo and print it out. They had a huge bank of file cabinets containing a hanging binder for each employee, some filled with one sentence memos that said stuff like “This week I drew the layout for the row driver circuit on the 245A chip”. When I joined they had finally relaxed this so that an action item only required a memo if there was a decision or a technical finding that had to be documented. But the action items were still submitted as Lotus 123 files on floppies and then consolidated into a giant spreadsheet for the CEO to review each week! (this was when networked computers were not ubiquitous, most of us were using Compaq PCs the size of a small suitcase)

  23. Scarlet ribbons in her hair*

    I suppose this counts. I used to work at a company where it was the receptionist’s job to let the owner’s secretary know when we were running low on letterhead. (This was in the 1990s, when people wrote business letters, not emails.) She couldn’t be bothered to do so, so Maria, the office manager, announced that it would be Scarlet and the receptionist’s job. Since the receptionist continued to do nothing, it became my job.

    It was also the receptionist’s job to run the mail through the postage meter and keep it filled with postage. Since she neglected this duty, it became Scarlet and the receptionist’s job, which meant that it became my job. I set up an arrangement with Pitney Bowes for Postage-By-Phone wherein I sent them a company check, which I got from the Comptroller, for $500.00, and whenever we started running low on postage, I made a call and pressed some buttons on the postage meter, and lo and behold, the $500.00 showed up in our postage meter, and I would then send them another $500.00 check.

    Then the owner went quite a while without having a secretary. He just couldn’t find a proper replacement. We started running low on letterhead, and I realized that there wasn’t anyone for me to notify that we needed to order letterhead. So I ordered some letterhead. Then I told Maria, who said okay. Then I told the owner, who was absolutely furious. He screamed and screamed at me that I shouldn’t have ordered it, because no one had told me to do so. I apologized, but that only made things worse, because, in his opinion, he apologized only when he did something wrong, so if I apologized, that meant that I knew that I had done something wrong. I finally managed to get a word in edgewise and said that I would cancel the order. That calmed him down. So I canceled the order and told him that it was canceled. I then told Maria that the owner had been furious at me for ordering letterhead because no one had told me to do so, so I had canceled the order. “Well! I guess YOU made a mistake!” she said. Yeah, I guess I did.

    A few months later, a co-worker came running over to me to say that we were out of letterhead. I wanted to say, “Why are you telling ME? What do I have to do with it?” But instead, I said, “Oh, really? Well, I ordered some a few months ago, but the owner got angry at me and made me cancel the order. He said that it was because no one had told me to do so. If you don’t believe me, you can ask him. If you don’t want to ask him, you can ask Maria, because she knew about it at the time.” So it took a while before we got new letterhead.

    I eventually gave two weeks notice at that company. On my last day, I asked Maria if she would like me to come in the following day to explain to people how to do the things that I did. She said that it wasn’t necessary, that she had everything under control. I tried to tell her that there were things that I did that no one was familiar with, but she kept insisting that it wasn’t necessary and she got angrier and angrier, so I decided to be maliciously complaint and I stopped talking.

    It didn’t take long for my former co-workers to call me at home and ask me how to do this and that and the other thing. I would tell them that I had offered to come back and explain everything to them, but Maria insisted that it wasn’t necessary, and if they didn’t believe me, they could ask her. Maria herself called me one day to ask about things, and I reminded her that I had tried and tried to persuade her to let me come back and explain things, but she kept refusing and kept telling me that she had everything under control. She admitted that I had tried and that she had refused.

    But I wish I could have been a fly on the wall the day they ran out of postage and didn’t know that all they had to do was make a call and press some buttons on the postage meter, and $500.00 worth of postage would appear. I am 99% certain that the Comptroller had no recollection of the checks payable to Pitney Bowes that I had asked for. I eventually found out that the receptionist ran out of the office one day, never to return. I wonder if it was the day the postage meter ran out of postage.

  25. Richard Hershberger*

    The cheap flights malicious compliance is a staple of the genre. In part it results from budget management. The people demanding the cheapest flights may well not care about the extra expenses that result, because those extra expenses come from someone else’s budget. But the other explanation is a corporate unwillingness to trust people to use good judgment. This would require someone higher up the food chain to pay attention, to ensure that said good judgment is used and not abused. It may be that there is no one trusted to do this until ridiculously high in the organization, with the CEO approving air reservations. Easier to impose a simple rule that a monkey can understand.

    1. bamcheeks*

      Yeah, except that apparently this one has a perfectly straightforward workaround: a box to tick for “out of policy for business need”. Choosing NOT to tick that box when everyone else does and apparently gets reimbursed quite happily seems out of the spirit of malicious compliance!

      1. Annie*

        Yup, we have that same thing, and often the lowest fair isn’t the best fair because of long layovers, non-direct flights or choice of airline (cheap awful service vs reasonable chance of being on-time).
        As long as I’ve provided a reason, I’ve never had it kicked back to me that I shouldn’t take that flight.

  26. What_the_What*

    #11 sure sounds familiar! Our company (DoD contractor) required the same thing. One time the “cheapest” airfare had me at a 6+ hour layover at a major airport–both ways. Didn’t get to my final location until well after midnight going to and coming from, meaning 2 extra days of per diem. They had to pay me me for my travel days far more than that airfare AND I lost 2 full days of work (salaried but non-exempt). I did get a massage, a few drinks and some souveneirs in the airport!) They finally changed the language to “lowest LOGICAL fare” which made a world of difference.

  27. Anxious Archivist*

    “And then I became an unskippable cutscene.” OP you brilliant being this is going into my lexicon now

    1. Snoozing not schmoozing*

      I was wondering what the heck that meant. I guess you have to be one of the cool kids to know. Cliques are so 1993.

        1. TeaCoziesRUs*

          I dunno… unless you count incessant commercials, Angry Birds doesn’t have any cut scene. Neither does Royal Match or the NYT games? ;)

      2. Good Enough For Government Work*

        I am not sure ‘has played almost any video game in the last 30+ years’ is exclusive enough to count as a clique.

        I don’t think ‘asks passive-aggressive questions in the reply chain of a comments section’ is either, tbf.

      4. Spreadsheet Hero*

        To explain a thing that you could have googled for yourself or asked literally anybody who has played at least non-cell-phone game in the last 30+ years about:

        A cutscene is a movie-like, non-interactive scene that takes place in a videogame and generally moves the story forward, usually into a major challenge or engagement. These scenes can often be “skipped” or cancelled — or can have lines of dialogue fast-forwarded through — by pressing a specific button. An “unskippable” cutscene is one where you just have to watch the thing play out. It is often a source of frustration for gamers because it’s implied to be a long unskippable scene right before a combat sequence so difficult that the player may see the scene several times in a row.

  28. George*

    Quite a few years ago “a bunch of the boys [and I] were whooping it up” (cf: The Shooting of Dan McGrew, by Robert Service) at the local saloon. We had been told that day that, should we have guests at our shared government quarters (but individual rooms), we were to immediately call our supervisor for permission to have someone there.

    There were the usual groans and “c’mon” to yet another stupid policy (for people in their 20s & 30s…) but a stern “you’ll do it!” reply. So, about 12:30 AM, we’re yukking it up and decide to call our respective supervisors from the pay phone (pre-cell days). Loud background, music, pinball machines, giggling: “Hey, Fergus. It’s Mike. It’s looking like I’m gonna get lucky tonight. Can I bring a guest back?”

    Fortunately 3 (out of 4) supervisors thought that was pretty funny. The policy was dropped two days later. (The 4th ws NOT AMUSED but fortunately no repercussions to the employee.)

    Side note. We were out in the boonies and absolutely no private housing anywhere nearby. They were the company town and housing was both assigned and a requirement for most.

  29. Beth*

    “And then I became an unskippable cut scene.”
    OMG yes, this. This is also my natural form of malicious compliance and it’s truly exhilarating when confronting truly dumb people or processes.

  30. Katherine*

    This isn’t really malicious compliance, because we actually really liked this customer, but, years and years ago (early 1990s), I worked at Burger King. We had a regular customer who always wanted extra, extra, extra onions–if there was burger patty visible beneath the extra onions, it wasn’t enough onions. We called this customer the Onion Lady and, because she was always so nice to us, we happily piled on the extra, extra onions just for her.

    Paula, if you’re out there reading this, I remember you and your extra onions fondly!

    1. Good Enough For Government Work*

      I think I’m this person for my local deli, but it’s black pepper on my bagel toppings! No, seriously, I want MORE

    2. Ann O'Nemity*

      Ha, this reminds me of Mayo Man. Years ago I worked in a sandwich shop and one of our regulars always wanted extra, extra mayo on his tuna sandwich. It was an unusual request, as the tuna salad already had a bunch of mayo in it, but Mayo Man was adamant he wanted MORE.

      Regarding #8, our shop actually trained us on what “everything” meant. It was most but not all of the possible toppings and condiments. And in smaller portions too, so the meat to topping ratio was still good.

  31. Lucifer*

    I don’t really get number 13 TBH (the chatGPT one). They couldn’t have just submitted a note saying that the coffee shop was too loud or whatever, so they stayed in their hotel room to get work done??
    Like, some of these stories seem less “malicious compliance” and more “petty toddlers cutting their nose off to spite their face” (thr engineer booking 5000 flights thru Instanbul or wherever)

    2. OP #13*

      Oh, I went back and forth with Finance on it, both for the original bill and for the interest charges! And it wasn’t just the $20, it’s that my entire reimbursement request was denied so I was stuck with hotel, local travel, and per diem expenses on my personal card. Ultimately I had to go through their formal “Appeals” process, which required multiple forms and a written justification of charges. That’s when I used ChatGPT.

      The malicious compliance was both the excessive way I followed the Appeals process and also that I never went out of my way to help the company save money on travel again. Company gives an option to book through a travel agency or get reimbursed? Fine, I’m using the expensive travel agency every time.

    3. H3llifIknow*

      I think the malicious compliance was in the “oh you want justification? I’ll GIVE you justification” knowing that ChatGPT was going to be long, rambling and wordy.

    4. Mango Freak*

      I also feel like the bookstore one would only be malicious compliance if they had, in fact, vomited at the kiosk.

  32. The fried egg is the best part*

    While I do sympathise with OP #8 (no need for the customers to be rude about it), I can’t help wondering if there was an accepted meaning somewhere nearby where “with everything” meant something specific, eg a competitor or neighbouring region!
    As an Australian, I’m reminded of the “burger with the lot” — in my state it means the usual lettuce, tomato, and onions, plus additional toppings that are usually some variation of a slice of canned beetroot, grated carrot, a slice of canned pineapple, cheese, bacon and a fried egg. Not sure if this is just a Queensland thing (pretty sure the pineapple is)!

    1. hugseverycat*

      Rudeness is seldom defensible, but I also felt a little for the customers asking for a sandwich “with everything”. To me, “with everything” means “with whatever toppings are normal for this sandwich”.

      I remember when I was working at a deli counter, I would get frustrated that people would walk up, look at all the displayed meat, and then tell me they wanted “turkey”. Like, you can see with your eyes that we have 15 different kinds of turkey in this deli case in front of you, right? But then when I whined about this on Facebook, a relative of mine said that he would probably be the person asking for “turkey” because he assumes that, since I’m the expert, I’d be able to tell him what the most normal turkey is.

      So I’m imagining that a lot of the people asking for “everything” are assuming that there is a normal set of toppings that the customer service person is aware of (and the customer isn’t) and that’s what they want. They probably don’t care about (or know about, or care to know about) the 4 kinds of mustard etc. They just want the normal mustard, if mustard is normal for this sandwich.

      1. Ace in the Hole*

        Original storyteller here – I had no problem with customers who were polite about it. It’s fine to ask for a sandwich with everything, as long as you don’t chew my ear off when I try to clarify to make sure you actually get the sandwich you want. I’d usually do this along the lines of “we have a lot of options, but lots of people like the turkey with lettuce, tomato, onion, regular mayo, and yellow mustard. Does that sound good to you?”

        Part of the problem, too, is that there’s no set standard for what is “normal” on most sandwiches. Does this particular customer think it’s normal to put mustard on the sandwich, or not? If they do want mustard, which do they think is normal – spicy dijon or mild yellow? How about pickles? Let me tell you, there is a deep and VICIOUS divide over whether or not pickles belong on a tuna sandwich. The person making the sandwich isn’t psychic, they can’t read customers’ minds.

    2. Chirpy*

      Having once worked at a Big Sandwich Chain, people commonly asked for “everything” or “make it like the picture” (on the sign). Most people meant they wanted lettuce, tomato, cheese, and mayo, *maybe* pickles, olives, onions, yellow mustard, and bell pepper. So we were told to ask if they wanted jalapeño or banana peppers, to which about half the people sheepishly answered no, they did not in fact want “everything”, and the other half were indignant because “I said EVERYTHING!” (We did have multiple sauces, as well, and I never had anyone want more than 2 on a sandwich. We also had bacon, but it cost extra on most subs.)

      I think people just get nervous, or they haven’t thought about what they actually wanted, and were embarrassed to ask/didn’t want to take up time in the line. I did have to ask many people who told me to “make it like the picture” to elaborate, as I did not have a list of things on the picture, and the subs had no specific toppings (they’re listed as “chicken bacon ranch” or whatever, everything else is customizable beyond the chicken and bacon – even the ranch, sometimes people get a different dressing.)

    4. Ace in the Hole*

      It’s amazing how regional this is… I have never before heard of a burger served with beetroot, grated carrot, pineapple slices, OR a fried egg.

      We were the only sandwich shop in a small town – there really wasn’t any competitor to compare to. We’d been in business more than 15 years, with essentially the same menu the whole time, and almost all our customers were locals who had ordered from us more than once. And everyone seemed to have slightly different ideas about what an “everything” sandwich entailed… mustard vs no mustard, pickles vs no pickles, whether or not it should get cheese (and whether swiss, cheddar, or provolone was “normal”), etc.

      I never did figure out why it was so difficult to just… say what they wanted? If it’s so standard, surely you can tell me what the standard is?

  34. the hulk's PTSD*

    the store being closed on Easter story: well now we know why David’s Bridal went bankrupt, lol (I’m assuming it’s David’s Bridal lol. No one correct me, let me have this).

    1. TeaCoziesRUs*

      David’s Bridal still exists. Alfred Angelo closed down their stores overnight.

      I remember because I had recently bought my dress through them for my own wedding – and to this day still love it. I couldn’t believe they’d hang thousands of brides out to dry like that!

      1. H3llifIknow*

        My daughter bought hers from AA and literally picked it up the day before they shut down… of course she didn’t get her alterations done by at least SHE got her dress. The news showed so many outraged, heartbroken brides literally banging on the doors of the store here!

  35. Catherine*

    I had to go to Paris on Eurostar for a work trip, in the midst of a cost cutting drive. I had to fill in form after form explaining costs and rationales, justifications etc.

    At the start of the approval process, the train ticket was £125. By the time it was approved and booked, only first class was available, at £500. I enjoyed the free champagne.

    1. H3llifIknow*

      I’ve learned to “fluff up” the fares when applying for travel approval thru my govt client. If it’s $600 today, I put down $1000 because there’s a good chance it’ll be at least that. So infuriating that they take up to a week or more to approve them knowing fare prices are so dynamic.

  36. TeaCoziesRUs*

    Re The Twist –

    I have listened to FAR too many RSlash Malicious Compliance stories (they’ve been good stories to listen to with kids in the car), and that sort reminded me of this one:

    Grumpy person comes into place (utility place? cell phone store?) complaining about extra fees. Store employee holds firm that they can’t remove the fees, and they must be paid or utility shuts off. In a big huff, customer plonks down a big bag of coins and says, “There you go!” in glee, having achieved malicious compliance. Employee blinks, sighs, and explains that she must count each coin to verify the payment is correct… then slowly begins to count. People waiting in line start to all questions, causing employee to answer, then start over with recounting. Employee just started her shift… she’s getting paid 8 hours regardless of how long it will take to serve this customer.

    Reverse Uno.

    1. What_the_What*

      I worked at a bank in the early 90s before coin counting machines were in the lobby. I had to count ~$960 in change for a woman who also hadn’t bothered to roll any of them. She wanted me to just count and deposit it and she’d leave “trusting me”. I told her I had to count it in her presence. Every time she sighed and asked “how much longer?” I’d say I lost count because she distracted me and start over.

  38. Grimey*

    At least LW1 and their team were asking for things a whole box at a time. “Boss, today I’m going to need 12 pieces of paper, one pen, and ten squares of toilet paper, so that’s 23 requisition forms. Also, I’ll need 23 additional requisition forms to request those requisition forms.”

  39. CussStitcher*

    Decades ago, my dad was an account manager for a major controls company (think thermostats, commercial refrigeration controls, etc). He traveled to every state except Alaska trouble shooting, meeting with customers, etc.

    In the 80s and 90s McDonalds didn’t take credit. My dad isn’t a big breakfast eater so he’d just run in, grab a coffee and maybe a McCalorie sandwich. This was great for years until a penny pincher at corporate changed the policy to require that for reimbursement, all meals had to be paid for with the corporate card. So, Dad’s choice was keep eating his normal but not be reimbursed, or start eating at the hotel restaurant so that he could buy it on the company card.

    Cue malicious compliance. Dad would go down to the hotel restaurant, order a full breakfast to go, take his to go coffee and hand the breakfast to whatever unhoused person he saw outside the hotel.

    Big Corporate bought a looooooot of breakfasts for random folks over the years

  40. It's Marie - Not Maria*

    I am bilingual Spanish, but not a native speaker, and I openly share that. I am fine with understanding many dialects of Spanish, but others, I am a lost cause. So, while someone can be bilingual, that does not necessarily mean they can fully understand every dialect of the languages they speak. Look how different the English of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Great Britian are! And even within each of those countries, the dialects vary greatly.

    1. Freya*

      My favourite Australian-ism is whether you call one particular thing you get from a fish & chip shop a potato cake, a potato scallop, a potato fritter, a scallop, a fritter, or something else. My husband is from NSW, so to him it’s a potato scallop or a scallop, whereas I grew up in South Australia so it’s a potato fritter.

      Or going to visit my kiwi cousins, and I’m wearing thongs and they’re wearing jandals and it’s the same footwear…

  41. nonprofit llama groomer*

    The tip comment reminds me of when I was sent to a training while working at a nonprofit about 20 years ago. I tried to claim tips because the hotel I was staying at had a gratis breakfast and full buffet of appetizers onsite and going offsite would have resulted in taxi costs AND restaurant dinners. Our ED (Executive Director, but also probably erecticle dysfunctioned – he was 15 years older then me and had a wife my age or younger) sent me a snarky memo that while tips were very nice, they wouldn’t reimburse me for them. I contacted HR or its equivalent who told me to request per diem reimbursement. So instead of my $10 tip reimbursement per deay, I ended up claiming the full $45 per diem each day. I could write so many stories about this ED and his misogynistic ways.

  42. i like hound dogs*

    As a teenager I worked at a fast food chain. The sweet tea we served came out hot/warm and was then served over ice, much of which melted quickly (apparently this is normal for sweet tea? I don’t drink it myself).

    Anyway, you had to scoop in a generous amount of ice to cool the hot tea down. But people would always think I was trying to short them on their drink by adding lots of ice and would say “no ice” or “just a little ice.” At first I’d explain the tea came out warm and they probably wanted that ice, or else they’d just be drinking some warm, ice-less sweet tea. But at some point, if the customer was a jerk, I’d just fill the cup to the top with the warm sweet tea and hand it to them. They’d always come back to the counter to request ice.

    I’ve only worked in a few fast food restaurants, but I feel like the idea that hourly workers are trying to save their company money by overserving ice in beverages is an urban legend. If anything, I preferred to give out less ice, because we had to refill the ice manually.

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