Are y’all ready, friends?
It’s time for yet another “Malicious Compliance” story from the pages of Reddit.
And this one will leave you shaking your head at the incompetence of these folks!
Read on to see what happened.
Want to log everything I do? Sure, I can do that.
“This was almost 10 years ago, contracting for a VERY large financial services provider.
For some context – team manager was promoted to a new division, and the team (8 of us working across 2 shifts to cover international as well) were left with two “team leaders” (will call them MoronBoy and PassiveGal, to run the **** show until the new manager was hired ( new mgr joined 6 months later, or early, depending on perspective, and probably because of me…).
They knew their role.
My job in a nutshell was to Onboard new employees into all the required systems for their daily functions, as well as set up their email and AD accounts for server access (which was dumped on my lap a month into my job “because I had prior experience”, so said MoronBoy).
I didn’t mind the email and AD because it’s literally 2 mins per account, and didn’t affect my central function by more than 20 mins a day (it’ll make sense soon). And audits were 30mins a week.
This all happened from a centrally shared mailbox. It’s requests, so you can’t determine how busy you are.
On to the fun – almost before the door hit the manager on the way out, MoronBoy and PassiveGal call us in to a meeting room, and states that we MUST do no less than 10 requests a day, ALL to be logged on their call logging system, and here’s the contract amendments we must sign or be fired.
They decided to speak up.
Being a contractor, you’d think I would shut the hell up, but nope.
So I piped up “I don’t see how it’s possible to guarantee 80 requests a day minimum for every team member to meet the requirement. Why not scalar the ticket count and see who did what?”.
His face turned a deeper colour and he shouts at me to mind my own business, I don’t know what I am talking about.
It was malicious compliance time.
Cue my MC, which included calling my contract house manager (SassyNFunnyGal) , explained what was happening, and after she could breathe again from laughing so hard, she told me not to get her fired…
I head back to my desk, knowing full well audits are about to start in a week, and I get multiple requests to make amendments on accounts to test Active Directory security.
And LO, here it begins!
I got an email two days later to prep for a massive test – I am tasked to amend nearly 6,000 accounts with new settings, and then change them back on request, with minimal impact to the users, during working hours, so I needed to do this quickly.
Now, any tech worth his measure out there, will know, almost ANYTHING is scriptable.
I set it all up, called my mate at service desk and here’s the “funny thing”, he ALSO has a script to log multiple tickets.
It was GO time.
Roll on D-day.
I take the auditors call at 8am to make the change. I send the email to my desk mate, and he logs the tickets in a record 30 seconds, my mailbox BOOMS with 6k opened tickets.
I run my script and 90 seconds later, bam, job done! I carried on with my core function.
3 hours later, auditor called me to revert.
I ran my 2nd script, everything back to normal, called my mate to close the tickets, and a minute later my mailbox frazzled for a bit getting 6k closure tickets.
It’s at this point I smile, sit back and start browsing all my meme sites (yes, joys of AD control, I gave myself unrestricted Internet access… A nice perk…).
You know who showed up next.
Anyhoo, in less than an hour, PassiveGal comes to me to ask what’s happening.
I simply state that the contract amendment they forced on us clearly means I don’t have to work for 200 days. So I’ll be sitting here enjoying my time off OR I can do it from home, either way, I’m “ahead of the curve”.
She walks away and MoronBoy storms over demanding I get back to work, I repeat what I said to PassiveGal, he spluttered for a while, and he huffs off.
True to my word, I sat at my desk doing nothing, but sadly it didn’t last 2 days before the head of the dept called me in.
After an initially aggressive start to the meeting on his part, I got to explain the sitch, I wasn’t even to the good part and he drops his head into his palm, calmly listens to the story, asks me for a copy of the amendment, and thanks me for the time.
2 hours later he calls me back and asks me, with SassyNFunnyGal in the room, what would it take to get me back to work.
Okay, here’s the deal…
I decided to keep it simple – formally retract the stupid amendment, and pay me out for the time spent on the audit, which is 600 days, “as per the contract amendment”.
He blowfished for a few seconds, agreed, and I left for the day.
Wake up the next morning to a HUGE jump in my bank account, with an email confirming I’ll be back in the office, “please”?
I AM a man of my word, I was back at my desk, working as usual, and for some reason, MoronBoy and PassiveGal never came near me again, even when I shifted to another dept.”
Check out how folks responded.
This reader had some questions…
Another individual tried to clarify what they were asking about.
And this Reddit user thinks these folks were plain STUPID.
Nice work!
We’re impressed!
If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.