July 10, 2024 at 5:45 am

Cheap Movie Theater Manager Insisted That All Snow On Sidewalks Be Removed, So A Worker Followed The Rules And Got Massive Overtime Pay

by Matthew Gilligan

It’s funny how some bosses want things done perfectly, but they also don’t want to give employees any extra money, isn’t it?

Hmmm…how curious!

And if you’ve been in that situation before, we think you’ll get a big kick out of this story from Reddit.

It’s malicious compliance at its finest!

Check out what happened.

“You can’t leave until you shovel ALL of the snow!”

“This wasn’t me doing the malicious compliance, nor the request, but the middle man who witnessed this gloriousness.

I worked for a movie theatre company in a state that snows every winter.

We had a contract with a snow shoveling company but my boss refused to use it because the costs of each removal had a possiblity of hurting his yearly bonus by a couple percent points (like $300 max out of $20,000).

Hmmm…

“Only if it snows more than six inches” he would say every time.

Unfortunately this meant that one of the ushers would have to shovel snow on the sidewalk.

Since it’s a safety hazard to block the emergency exit doors of a theatre it meant you had to shovel a path around the entire building and for each exit door.

That’s a lot of work…

Ultimately due to the size it’s about a quarter mile around the building. No one likes doing it because it’s cold and shoveling a simple one shovel-length path can take two hours.

During a snowy Christmas week (the busiest week for movie theaters of the year, imagine Black Friday shopping for two weeks straight) it had snowed just under six inches.

We were extremely busy and my boss demanded to take one of our much needed ushers to go shovel snow (I was an assistant manager).

When we asked if the company could come out instead of us doing it we were told no, to which one of my co-workers (we’ll call him Dan) said he would do it. An hour later after he had gone outside one by one my boss pulled each usher in and wrote them up for “refusing to shovel snow”.

When Dan came back in the other ushers complained to him about it. Dan asked our boss why and our boss said that it was because no one wanted to shovel all of the snow, and if Dan didn’t shovel all of the snow he would get written up as well. This all happened at the beginning of my shift, around 5pm.

And now things get interesting…

Cue the malicious compliance.

What my boss didn’t realize was that it was the last day of the payroll period.

Being Christmas week Dan had already accumulated 40 hours of work earlier in the day.

My boss left right after telling Dan to make sure ALL of the snow was removed.

We worked the rest of the shift and everyone assumed Dan had finished and left.

He’s still at it!

It’s 3am now and we go to punch out for the week but can’t because there is a shift that hasn’t been approved yet.

Someone is still working and is at 12 hours of overtime. It’s Dan.

I go out to investigate since it should only be myself and my manager.

As I walk outside I see Dan coming back in, smiling the biggest grin on his face, and the most dry, un-snowed path I’ve ever seen in my life. It looked like two pictures cut together; there was not a speck of snow on the entire front path of the theatre.

Dan spent ten hours outside sure that he removed ALL the snow from the walkway. We had a good laugh, clocked off and left.

We didn’t hear anything until later that week when I was called into the office and had to write out a statement to why I let Dan work twelve hours of overtime.

He had this smug look on his face like he had “beaten” us.

He was not too pleased when he found out that all of our statements included him saying the phrase “remove all the snow” and that he refused to call the snow plow company.

My boss was transferred to another theatre soon after.”

Let’s see how Reddit users reacted.

This reader nailed it.