He tried his best to be the most successful salesman in the lot and yet, due to grudges and workplace politics, he was kicked out.

The most interesting part of this story is how the company couldn’t manage a better salesman and ended up losing a great asset.

Let’s see how this man’s new manager ruined everything at work!

Do everything to keep a salesman from selling? Okay, let’s see how that works out for you boss.

In college I worked for a computer parts store in their Build Your Own section; lets call this place, MacroPoint.

I was a good seller and made a ton of money, something like 2400 a check.

I was very happy, and feeling myself. I even bought a shirt that said DJ Breadwinner and would wear it under my nice clothes all the time.

He has his clever rules set and they seem to be working out for him.

The job was easy if you follow two simple rules;

1: never sell them something they don’t need.

2: the customer only has the options you give them.

The latter seems a bit disingenuous; but if you follow 1, you’ll never go wrong with 2.

My two biggest abilities were that, A, I helped everyone and was very polite and energetic, so I got a lot of repeat customers who would wait and deal only with me, and B, I could sell warranties like nobody’s business.

The warranties were easy to sell, since we had an accidental damage plan on most items, and one that replaced components in a build if you paid us to build it.

This man was clever when he was selling his plans to the customers!

I would simply say something like; ‘You want to buy the accidental damage plan, it may be expensive, but it lasts three years! Put that date in your phone, on your calendar… a week before it’s up, throw this son of a b at a wall and then come get the latest model for free!”

The plan says they might ask a few questions, but the truth is they didn’t, with accidental damage, bring in a broke item get the same or if that’s not available, usually not, get the latest price equivalent model.

Most people took that bet and I was successful.

However, there is always a BUT to a story…

Things were great until we got a new manager for our department, we’ll call him, Incompecito, he was, as his name implies, incompetent.

He had come over from Circuit Metropolis and had been a store manager or something. Their business had just folded. He brought all kinds of new and stupid ideas to the department. The worst was switching how we did cleaning and stocking.

Before, we cleaned at night and stocked periodically in the early morning when it was slow, when the truck came.

Incompecito wanted us to clean in the morning, so we were on the floor for the early morning customers, and stock at night; cause anything that wasn’t fully stocked in our department through the day went up when we merchandised at night and cleaned.

Incompecito’s plans weren’t doing any good!

I think he was trying to stop us getting overtime or something. Which as stupid, cause we made like 5 dollars an hour, plus commission. Our hourly wage was jack s**t.

The biggest problem here is that things off the truck are in the system, so when a customer wants something, the system says we have it, and it’s not on the shelf.

We have to waste time, not being on the floor, going to look for things in the pallets and that hurts our sales. This is a completely stupid idea that failed spectacularly, and I earned the ire of Incompecito by going to the store manager after our objections were ignored and explaining it.

I may have earned his undying ire when he told the store manager that ‘that was the way they did it back at Circuit Metropolis’, and I remarked that that was probably why they went out of business. In my defense, f**k Incompecito. He was costing me like 500 a check.

One problem after another!

Eventually, this got fixed, but a new issue started and this one was really annoying.

Now, we were not aloud to sell in other departments unless they were connected to or up sales on our builds. TV, apple, games, and general section in the middle of the store. I and others had mastered upselling whole TVs instead of monitors and gaming peripherals and all that. We got a higher percentage of peripherals than core sells, so making a TV a peripheral was big money.

Incompecito, who was trying to buddy up to the hot c***k who ran the department, had forbid us to upsell TVs or hand that off as a seperate thing for the TV people. This did not go over well in our department.

The new manager would do anything but his job!

As the lead salesman in my department, I was particularly pissed, but he threatened writes ups for anyone who disobeyed and the store manager was tired of us going around Incompecito so he just started saying; it’s his department. He eventually forbade us from upselling anywhere else in the store. I’m like cool, bet.

Queue the Malicious compliance.

The story then picks up..

You see, even if it’s from other departments, if the sale starts in our department, the numbers are attributed to our department.

This here affects Incompecito’s bonus, but also, the only reason more TVs were being sold in the first place, was that we were convincing gamers to get big TVs and use them as monitors instead of monitors. So, when we stopped doing that, Units stopped going out with the same frequency and the numbers for our department dropped sharply.

It was actually rough to get all the sales people to just stick to our department and not go around Incompecito.

This man then did what was long overdue!

But, it only took about two months for anyone to start noticing the problem. They’d called a meeting of the Departments and talked about TV and BYO underperforming. When they asked why, I feigned ignorance and just said we were following what Incompecito said.

We let the Store Manager slowly piece together why things were happening… Incompecito got chewed out and TV lady, lets called her, Legs for Days, was also chewed out. We didn’t know why at first, but apparently she’d done this to the manager before the manager that hired me.

The one before Incompecito was a woman, but her predecessor was a man. Apparently Legs for days had a way of flirting and getting special treatment for her department and taking advantage of idiots like Incompecito.

Incompecito wasn’t going to let things slide that easily..

I’d like to say that was the end and Incompecito eased up and got out of the way. But no, he was petty and a d**k. He conspired with Snake, someone of his own culture, to get rid of me.

I found this out because Snake was popular with the girls, but also talked too much. He would allow Snake to upsell in our area and had one of the girls often remove my sticker and put Snakes on it.

He started scheduling me at weird times and started selling the store manager on the idea that I was detrimental to the morale of the department.

A lot of them were lazy and relied on the ‘pool’… when you don’t help someone and they buy something, the money goes into the pool and is distributed amongst the entire department. If it doesn’t look like a big build, some folks would just let that go to the pool.

This man was genuinely inclined towards his job and was only trying to work..

I did not, I helped everyone and turned small items into big purchases. Admittedly, that hurt everyone else pockets, but were told to help EVERYONE and to absolutely NOT be lazy and let things go to the pool.

So the weird way it ended up being explained to me, is that if I sold 10 of an item. I got paid lets say 100 bucks, because of a multiplier or whatever. But if I sold 5, and someone else sold 5, no one would get the multiplier, and thus they would pay each 40 dollars or something, instead of paying 100 for the same amount of merch being sold.

It was all convoluted and sounded like a bs excuse, but Incompecito ended up convincing them that they ‘Couldn’t afford me,’ right then. Normally they fire people on the spot, cause we’ve got a high risk of theft, but they let me work those last 2 weeks.

So he got another chance to prove himself..

I asked; ‘What he expected me to do…’

He told me; ‘I expect you to sell…’ so… sell I did.

Queue Malicious compliance 2.

I was going to show them what they were losing, I wanted them to ‘FEEL’ my absence.

He made a WHOPPING amount of sales!

I was determined to try to break the sales record my last few days and totally came close.

I was averaging something like 7800 in sales, way up from my 3000 a day, which still had me around the best best.

See the record was somewhere around 14,000 in a day and I had hit 11,000 and 13,000, but sadly could not hit the record.

But my numbers were insane during that time. My last check was stupid high.

But alas, Incompecito did manage to get me out of there, though Store Manager said he’d hire me back if things changed.

Instead, Incompecito waited a month and moved Snake into my place in the department. Needless to say, their numbers were not the same.

He finally saw how karma hit them

I didn’t get my closure on this until about four months later when I found Incompecito and Store Manager had been fired.

They opened a Bengal Direct across the way and MacroPoint had been losing clients and money.

Worse, apparently my department hadn’t really recovered from my loss.

Things came to a head at a quarterly meeting when the regional manager came to present the top sales awards and apparently I had won it, even missing two months or so of sales.

And then something comedic happened..

No one had told him I had been fired, so he looked like an idiot trying to present the award, there was a banner and everything.

I also found out that Snake got fired for two separate offenses, stealing which they were investigating, and having “relations” with one of the cashiers in the back, which lead to his immediate termination.

It had come out that Incompecito had caught Snake before doing something inappropriate and just gave him a vague write up. That, the debacle with me, and the low sales got Incompecito fired. I received a call to see if I wanted to come back, but I had already taken on extra classes by then.

It’s not the best, most thought out malicious compliance. But it is what it is.

Geez! That was some workplace drama. This man tried his best to retain his place as a salesman but this one bad manager made it impossible for him to do so. Even after all the malicious compliances, things didn’t work out. But in the end, neither did it work out for incompecito or snake!

Let’s see what the commentators had to say about it.

This person knows what it’s like to lose the best sales guy.

This person is truly impressed!

This person seems a little lost..

This person wants salesmen to work a certain way and has figured out the key to one’s success.

This person loves the embarrassment that the company must’ve faced while presenting the award.

Revenge is a dish best served cold…

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.