Micromanaging people who actually know what they’re doing at work is never a good thing!

And if you’ve ever been in that situation, you know that it causes a lot of unnecessary drama and you end up losing a lot of time that could be spent WORKING.

This story from Reddit’s “Malicious Compliance” page took place in a medical office.

Oh you want individual emails? You got it.

“I recently moved to a new state and got a new job managing an office in a medical field.

Every morning, one of my responsibilities is emailing a list of patients by the type of appointment they had and the details of their appointment (called an encounter) to Records from the day prior.

They had their routine down pat.

I separate documents by type of appointment and attach the files to a single email with the date. Having worked in records before, sorting by date and having sub-categories for type was easiest for me, and this is the way the new place trained me to do it.

And then they got an email…

After about two weeks of doing it the way I was told/the way I thought was easiest, I got a very abrupt passive-aggressive email in response.

“Send encounters each in individual emails. Thanks, AngryRecordsPerson.”

I tried to reach out for clarification. Do they want an entire list of one appointment type in an individual email? How the heck do you want it done? Just tell me. There was no answer from my question, so I just continued to send it how I was taught.

And then another one.

Another week goes by, and I get another passive-aggressive email.

“Per my last email, send encounters each in individual emails.” No please, thank you, or response to my questions at all.

It was time for malicious compliance.

So I maliciously complied. It took about 2 extra hours of my time, but I did as she asked and painstakingly sent each encounter in a separate email. One single encounter per email. That equaled about 60 emails back to back to back instead of one nicely laid out email sorted by type.

They got the message pretty quickly!

2 days of this and I quickly got a response.

“Please stop. You are cluttering my email. You may send me one email with the encounter types attached. Thanks, AngryRecordsPerson. ”

Yeah, I thought so.

I continued to send the emails how I was trained, and I haven’t had a problem since.”

And here’s what people had to say.

One reader came up with further plans for this person.

Another individual did something similar.

This Reddit user said this person wasn’t acting like an adult.

Another reader can picture it all…

And this person shared their own story from the workplace.

Learning things the hard way.

You gotta love it!