Hey, all you can do at work is follow the rules, right?

Darn right!

And that means even if you know it’s gonna make your boss angry…

Rules are rules!

Take a look at this story from Reddit’s “Malicious Compliance” page and see what you think.

Boss says we can’t drive the work truck, so we don’t!

“Right after high school, my friend and I were looking for practically anything to make money and his older brother told us about a job he once had working for this guy washing windows.

Now, this guy owns what appears to be a semi-legitimate business, he has a full shop/garage where he stores cleaning products, big fancy tubs that use sonic waves to wash blinds in and a new (at the time) work truck.

There was a problem…

He’s also a HARDCORE penny pincher and buys the cheapest, worst insurance he can on the truck. Initially when we got hired on he would meet us at the shop at 7 am, give us the work orders and ride out with us for on-the-job training.

After a couple of weeks he would just leave the work orders in his office and then leave us to our own devices.

Now I want to preface with, we weren’t lazy, we got paid hourly like $9/hour but we commissioned based on the # of individual windows we cleaned in a day + how many windows required a ladder (those paid an extra $0.50 each) so if we knocked out 3-4 jobs in one day we could take home approximately $14-15/hour.

Another important fact is that this was RIGHT after high school, so we were both 18 and for whatever reason, the boss didn’t bother to ask or check our hiring paperwork to confirm this.

Well after a month or so he finds out how old we are and has a come apart, turns out his insurance on his truck has a clause that anyone driving has to be at least 25 years old with a clean driving record (no DUIs or anything like that) or his monthly payment triples.

Got it!

So he makes it very, VERY clear to us that we are NOT to drive the truck and if he finds out we’re doing it anyway, he’ll fire us and dock any bonus pay from our final checks (legally he can do that because it’s bonus, not hourly.)

I need to drive home the fact that he was so delusional that he never paid attention to ANYTHING so one day we come into the shop and see a stack of about 15 jobs, however, he didn’t schedule anyone else (never actually scheduled himself because he expected the shop to just run itself) except for the two of us that day.

Cue Malicious Compliance

He liked to micromanage, but simultaneously NEVER picked up his phone if WE called HIM.

So despite calling him numerous times to let him know we can’t do anything, we end up just sitting in the shop and listening to the radio for most of the day.

This was also only a year or two after smartphones came out so things like streaming music/movies or playing games on your phone was essentially non-existent unless you had a spare $1,000.00 lying around to buy the fancy new iPhone2!!

He wasn’t gonna like this.

Fast-forward about 5 hours and he calls one of us to ask how things are going, how many jobs we’d finished and if we needed help to get any completed. We explained that we’d been sitting in the shop all day waiting for him to come in so we could get started.

Well, at this point he goes ballistic and starts just tearing us up one side and down the other about wasting his time/money and blah blah blah.

“Why didn’t you call me!?” “Who else is there?!” “Has anyone finished any of the jobs?!”

Needless to say, that was our last day there, but we threatened to report him if he didn’t pay us for the time we sat in the shop that day so we still got paid almost a full day’s wages and from what I heard within a year or so later his shop folded so win-win I guess.”

Here’s how Reddit users reacted.

One person thinks they know what was going on here…

Another person summed it up perfectly.

This reader shared a story.

Another Reddit user shared their thoughts.

And this person got a kick out of this story.

This boss needed a serious attitude adjustment.

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.