Sometimes following the rules exactly doesn’t make sense, such as in today’s story about an employee who used to work at a bicycle delivery company.

Following the manager from corporate’s advice worked to his advantage and put the manager in her place at the same time.

Let’s see how the story plays out…

“Your bike has to be parked correctly in the garage, and if you need to take out other bikes to park yours, you have to park them back correctly too.” Ok.

Until recently, I used to work part-time for a delivery company that uses half pedal-powered, half battery-powered 6-wheeled “bikes” that work like little semi trucks

(not Hermes, I purposefully chose a picture that didn’t show my actual company name).

So after every shift we have to park the bikes in the garage.

Technically there are designated spots in the garage for each individual bike.

But since people don’t finish their shifts and come back in the exact time sequence that the bikes have to be parked in, in practice nobody actually parks the bikes in their “correct” spot.

The first person back just parks at the back even if their bike is supposed to be parked further up front, and the next person to return parks in front of the first parked bike, and so on.

They introduce us to the problem – Karen…

The shift managers know about it and are cool with it. They work in the garage so they understand.

But new Karen from corporate who just joined a couple days ago did not.

She came in suddenly at the end of one day to “check things out” and found that my bike was parked at the very front.

I had finished last that day because I had a super long shift.

But Karen called me immediately and chewed me out on the phone and essentially told me in no pleasant terms the title of the post.

They ignored his manager and did what Karen told him to do.

I called my shift manager right after and informed him.

He said something like, “well, technically she is right so we can’t oppose her directly. I suggest you just ignore her. I doubt she will be back to check.”

Well, I did not want to let Karen have this win over me. So I did exactly what she told me to do.

I waited a couple more days until I got another mega shift. I arrived early to claim the bike that was technically designated to be parked at the very back.

You can already see where this is going.

After finishing my route, I specifically drove back slowly to make sure I would be the last one back.

It took a LONG time to rearrange all the bikes.

Once back, I took out every single bike in the garage by myself.

Then I parked my bike and took my sweet time making sure it was parked perfectly centrally in between the lines as well, not just lengthwise.

You can see how that would take a long time since the bikes work like semi trucks in movement mechanism.

So it took me nearly 10 mins to take care of one bike.

I had only 59 more to go.

They got 6 hours of overtime.

I meticulously parked every single bike at their correct spots until the dead of the night that day.

My shift manager caught on to my plan soon and chose to turn a blind eye since I was technically following orders from higher ups.

I booked 6 hours of overtime that day before I clocked out and was scheduled for a whole lot of payment.

Accounts wasn’t happy about all the overtime.

Next morning accounts suddenly call me to ask if I had forgotten to clock out and come back later to do it because it showed that I clocked out ~6 hours later than everyone else.

I told them exactly what happened and suggested that they watch the security camera feed inside the garage to make sure that I was actually working the entire time.

They eventually folded and told me to not do it again.

Karen had to change her orders.

I politely declined and said that I will do the same thing again next day because those were my orders.

They said, “our managerial team will contact you with updated instructions soon. Follow those instructions.”

I said okay.

I received a slack message from Karen later that day before starting my shift saying I should follow my shift manager’s directions to park my bike from now.

Karen had to be more specific.

So I did the exact same thing again that day because shift manager did say that technically the bikes were supposed to be parked in their designated spots.

Had the same conversation next morning with accounts and received another Slack message from Karen saying I should park my bike according to what made sense realistically.

I’m still gloating over my W over corporate Karen to this day.

Wow. That’s a big W because they got paid for all that overtime and Karen learned a lesson the hard way.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this post…

This reader makes a point about management.

Here’s a comeback they could’ve used…

Another person would use this excuse to get more overtime…

This reader points out how great this malicious compliance was.

Another reader praised them for making management feel “the pain.”

I think pass the pain upwards is the lesson in this story.

And isn’t that the way it should be?

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.