It can be really frustrating to wait around at work when there’s nothing for you to do.

If you could do something else productive while you were waiting, would you do it, or would you wait for the job you were tasked with to be ready for you to work on it?

In today’s story, one employee tries to stay consistently busy, but when that backfires, the employee proves a point to the boss.

Let’s read the whole story.

Just work on this one board.

I worked at a contract manufacturing company that assembled and tested electronic PCBs for various other companies.

They were big on keeping track of times and quantities to be able to properly charge for work done or to be within the quote.

You’d be clocking in and out of different jobs as you finished a step or moved to a different product.

This employee found a way to fill the extra time.

Well one day I was working on board XYZ that took only about 1 minute to function test.

I would get 5 per tray about every 15 minutes.

That leaves me with 10 minutes of idle hands so I would work on board ABC that we already had a large quantity of on the test floor.

So I would test boards ABC for awhile and then test the XYZ boards after I got a few trays of them on the shelf.

The boss seemed to think the employee wasn’t focused on the XYZ boards.

Boss: Why you working of those boards, we need the XYZ boards to ship this week, don’t worry about the ABC boards.

(As if I already knew that XYZ were rushed or something)

Me: I’m testing those boards quicker then they are giving me them to me.

Boss: I don’t care just get these damn boards done that’s all I care about. Don’t work on anything else, I just want you to focus all your attention on these boards. We need to get them done!

Malicious compliance time.

The employee did exactly as told.

Test for 5 minutes, wait for 10 minutes. For 8 hours.

End of day comes.

Boss: How many XYZ boards you get done today?

Me: About 160

Boss: How long that take you?

Time to tell the truth.

Me: (I’m a wise acre so I already knew where this was going.) Of actually work?

Boss: Yes

Me: little over 2.5 hours.

Boss: What the hell you do the rest of the day?

Me: Waited.

Again, more honesty.

Boss: Why the hell you do that?

Me: Remember when I said I was testing the boards faster then I was getting them and you said to only work on those boards?

Boss: Stupid boss face.

Me: That’s why!

I couldn’t honestly write like 10 more of these on this sub reddit from working at that place. Some people never learn.

At least the boss finally seems to have understood the mistake.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This person feels grateful for having a better manager than the boss in this story.

This is a good question.

This is true!

This does seem quite common.

Bosses don’t always understand the consequences of their words.

They should, though.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.