Hey, I’m all for unions, but even I can admit that sometimes, the rules and regulations get a little ridiculous.

Take the story you’re about to read, for example.

It’s a perfect illustration of what I’m talking about.

Check out what happened!

Don’t touch anything electrical if you’re not an electrician.

“Years back I used to work on the melt deck at a foundry in the area, it was a union job so everyone had their own roles to do.

I was in melting and one of our jobs was to melt the iron for another department to pour into the molds.

Every so often we would trip a breaker on one of the furnaces and had to call an electrician to come up to the melt deck to fix it. The panels for the furnaces opened up and the electricians would just flip a switch and it’d be fixed.

The problem was, sometimes it would take 20+ minutes for an electrician to show up and fix it.

This was costing them money.

Waiting a few minutes wasn’t much of a big deal but when it would over 30 minutes it would start cutting into our pay since we got paid based on tonnage melted, and when we couldn’t melt iron…no money.

Eventually our ATF (Assistant to the Foreman) got sick of it and would open the panel and flip the switch himself so we could keep going.

The electricians found out what we were doing and had a meltdown (no pun intended), and told us we weren’t allowed to do that and not to touch anything electrical if we weren’t an electrician.

Some words were had and we agreed, only for the electricians to go right back to taking forever responding to our calls. Everyone on the melt deck decided that ANYTHING electrical was out of our pay grade.

Guys, we need some help!

We then proceeded to call electricians up to the melt deck to plug in and unplug our phone chargers stating “it’s electrical I can’t touch it”.

Of course we wouldn’t tell them that over the radio just that we need an electrician on the melt deck for an electrical issue.

They didn’t find it as funny as we did and eventually we all agreed to stop calling them for our phones and their response time significantly improved.”

Now let’s see what people had to say on Reddit.

One person shared their own story.

Another person spoke up.

This reader also had a tale to tell.

One individual shared their thoughts.

Hey, whatever you say…

Malicious compliance at its finest!

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.