Whatever you say, boss…

Have you ever uttered those words before even when you knew The Man was directing you to do something stupid?

Sure, we’ve all been there!

And that’s why you’ll enjoy this story from Reddit’s “Malicious Compliance” page.

Read on to get all the details!

Boss wants me to cut Internet to employees. I comply.

“When I was at the university, a friend landed a part time job doing networking for a really small company and asked me if I wanted in because he also had other customers and was worried he wouldn’t be able to handle them all.

Sure, why not?

It was easy money, 12 hours per month, to basically maintain the network infrastructure, upgrade firmware on routers, check logs, run antivirus software and install some stuff on computers, so I said yes.

The company used to fix and sell printers and printer related stuff.

It was run by two ladies that were friends, let’s call them May and June, but the CEO in functions was May’s husband, let’s call him CEOPeter, who was also June’s husband best friend.

The rest of the company were AccountantPeter, that shared the name with the CEO, some technicians that were never there and two hardworking sales representatives.

Only certain folks were pulling their weight.

Basically, the accountant, technicians and sales reps were the only ones doing work there. Even though May and June were also, technically, sales reps, they hardly ever made a call.

May spent all day browsing internet for things to buy (her thing was shoes), June spent all day chatting with another guy (not her husband) who also shared the name with the CEO, let’s call him ThirdPeter, and CEOPeter spent all day watching pr0n, yes, at work. May appeared to have no problems with CEOPeter habits.

I spent most of the time there trying to clean CEOPeter’s computer from the myriad of viruses that he would install browsing sketchy sites, and even when I complained a lot about it to him, he said that he didn’t know why there were so many viruses and kept doing it every single day.

This wasn’t a good working environment.

The place was full of drama, and after a while, me and my friend would pretend to have work to do there and spent time there just for the LOLs.

One day, May approaches me furious, saying that she caught one of the sales reps browsing internet instead of doing calls, she wanted to disable internet for the reps.

I checked the logs, the rep browsed the specs of one of the machines she was selling, a newer model she wasn’t familiar with.

If that’s what you want…

So, cue malicious compliance.

I disabled internet for the whole company.

About 2 minutes later, May, June and CEOPeter came running to the server room, shouting about what the hell was happening to their internet.

Accountant and sales rep pretty much never realized something changed, because they were hard at work.

I told them that May made me do it. She said “but just to the reps!” and I told them some bull that I couldn’t block a specific IP because they were assigned dynamically, so they were about to change and blah blah blah…

CEOPeter was red as a tomato. He demanded to reinstate internet for everyone.

I looked at June, she nodded. I looked at May, she said “are you sure you can’t just for them?”

I said no.

She exhaled. “OK, then, Internet is back up”.”

Reddit users shared their thoughts.

This person spoke up.

Another Reddit user shared a story.

This person weighed in.

Another reader chimed in.

And this person shared how they do it.

How about…no one gets any Internet?!?!

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.