There’s nothing quite as annoying at work as a micromanager.
Well, maybe a micromanager that doesn’t actually understand the job, and therefore won’t understand any documentation that you hand over in the first place.
OP has a very specialized skill set that makes her invaluable at work.
Backstory…I’m a support person working with engineers for very specialized, very large documents. I’ve got a wide range of skills that one person normally wouldn’t have.
I also designed the process, format & everything except content for this one massive (10K pages) document spread over 100s of interconnected file using a specialized software, and trained my team on software & processes for the basically weekly submittals to various entities with the changes.
I was the Subject matter expert, tho not as acknowledged as such because it’s just support, not engineering. (Let’s be honest some older engineers saw me as a secretary cause of lack of Y chromosome combined with my lack of engineering degree)
That said, she’s not professionally trained, etc, so her new supervisor thought she could bully her around.
Back in 2011, a person was added to my group. I felt just to stress me out. “Lucy” wasn’t a manager, but she had authority to assign tasks to me. I think she was efficiency expert or something.
She really stressed me out…always pulling me into her office to discuss stuff and I’d have to speak in plain English about the software I use and program (nothing fancy as I’m self taught, more VBA versus C++), but a normal person wouldn’t understand a lot of what I did, so the extra effort to explain stuff was annoying.
And she constantly talked down to me. Like a elementary school teacher. You know that voice. It may have been because I looked young.
One day I even had to say “You know I’m in my 30s & I’ve worked here for over 10 years, right?” because she mentioned something about when I was young like you, and was trying to advise me on my new career.
She made my life miserable while being fake nice.
So, when the other woman asked for a “detailed account” of every task she performed in a week, OP knew she could shut her up once and for all.
On to the malicious compliance: One week, Lucy “assigned” me to track every single task I did in my week. She wanted all 40 hours accounted for. I tried to push back but no dice.
So I did.
Did I mention I had two computers (one I used for specific tasks (basically macros) for a specific software.
The list had things like Meeting with Lucy & “Janice” 2.5 hrs.
A variety of rows for saying I answered this question or taught people stuff (most under an hour) And of course, detailed technical steps that she wouldn’t understand as she doesn’t know the various specialized software 4-7 hours each Coup de Grace …make this list 1.5 hours.
It worked like a charm, too.
All in all, I squeezed 55.9 hours into that 40 hour week, which, looking at the list, was a pretty average week.
I sent her the list & said “I guess I’m even more efficient than I thought.”
No response.
She disappeared shortly after that…maybe someone threw water on her.
Never did learn why she was there; or if I did, I blanked it out.
I wondered if they were trying to replace me, but I was/am, unfortunately, irreplaceable. I’m still here and she’s not.
The people on Reddit who got her reference loved it.
They say it seems like things were not going as planned.
Sometimes upper management just needs to leave you alone.
This person hopes OP is well-compensated for her work.
At least her company seemed to figure it out.
This woman has a lot of patience.
That always serves folks well in the end.
Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.