One thing that people DO NOT LIKE is when their phones get cut off for no reason and with no explanation.

So all I could think when reading this story was…HUH?

But the person who wrote this tale on Reddit only did what they were told!

Check out what they had to say.

Shut Up and Do What I tell You. Ok Boss!

“My home country of Canada just happened to have an incident where Rogers, one of the “Big Three” telecommunications companies, accidentally cut off all telecommunications for 25% of Canada.

As well as the Point of Sale systems for most businesses across the country.

This reminded me of an Malicious Compliance incident that happened during my time working at a call centre for a Canadian Telecommunications Company.

This tale starts all the way back in 2013, and involves my time working at a call centre at the 4th largest national cellular carrier.

For your information…

For a little bit of context about Canadian telecommunications, and specifically cell phone services, Canada is the second largest nation on earth, by landmass.

And has one of the lowest population densities and the Federal Government has some strict laws about foreign ownership and financing of telecommunications.

As a result of this, cell phone plans are very expensive and the only companies that offer service are already established large companies with the resources to purchase spectrum and set up infrastructure.

My employer was a newcomer to the market and was trying to make a splash by offering lower priced services on the recently auctioned off AWS spectrum.

The expensive cell phone plans that were offered in Canada were a real hot button issue.

Such a hot button that in the 2011 Federal Election, all of the major political parties campaigned with the promise to make services better and lower prices.

(I think even the Bloc had a campaign promise too).

The result of this election was that in 2013, the CRTC (Canadian Radio and Television Commission) revised a bunch of the laws that regulated cell phone providers, specifically cellphone contracts.

The updated laws were called the “CRTC Code of Conduct”.

There were some changes coming.

The new wireless code made a bunch of changes but the most important were that cell phone contracts were required to be written in “Plain English” (instead of legalese).

Any service advertised as unlimited can not have an overage charge, by law.

These new regulations were a very big deal at the time.

Employees at the call centre I worked at were required to sit through multiple training sessions and take quizzes/tests about this to make sure we knew and understood the new laws.

When this was happening I was working in the “Back Office” department in one of the call centres for this cellular carrier.

The back office department served several functions, but I had managed to find a niche in the department.

I had become responsible for monitoring people’s roaming usage, when travelling outside of Canada, and disconnect them before they get bill shock.

Wow!

At the time, it was not uncommon to find news stories of people coming home from a trip and having an $85,000 Phone Bill.

I was the sole person responsible for making sure that this didn’t happen.

Also I worked part time, 3 days a week.

The supervisor of the Back Office department did not get along with me.

He would constantly harass me.

I was previously in the Technical Support department, where he was the supervisor, when the harassment began.

I eventually became frustrated with the way I was being treated and transferred away from Technical Support to Back Office so that I could escape from the abuse.

A couple of months after I transferred, he transferred too and became my supervisor once again and the abuse continued.

I am not sure what I did to this person to make this person treat me the way that they did, but we had an antagonistic relationship for as long as he was my supervisor.

So in 2014 my employer became the first carrier (to my knowledge) to offer “Unlimited USA Roaming.”

You could pay $15 a month, on top of your normal monthly plan, and get unlimited roaming in the United States.

They also had offered a trucker plan for $35 a month, total, that would have unlimited voice, sms, and data anywhere in North America, and it was marketed directly to long haul truckers.

This add on and plan were a pretty big deal as other carriers were charging $2 – $5 /MB for data roaming (Doing a big of research, SOLO Mobile charges $6 /MB for USA Roaming To This Day).

To my mind, monitoring USA Roaming is no longer a high priority as I can’t disconnect people that have this add on, or appropriate plan, because it’s against the law.

I continue to monitor roaming usage, and every time I see a user with a massive amount of data usage I go into their account to confirm the existence of the addon or a plan that would allow for this roaming usage, once confirmed I move onto the next account.

They noticed something.

My attention quickly starts to be focused on people travelling in Europe, Asia and Africa.

There are fewer people roaming in those locations, as Canada doesn’t share a land border with them, and the Data Roaming rate is a lot more expensive (to the tune of $20 / MB).

This is going well for a couple of weeks, until my supervisor comes up and asks why I am not deactivating the accounts travelling in the United States anymore.

I attempt to explain that I can’t deactivate these customers as they have an appropriate plan or add on and if I were to do this then the company would be in violation of the new laws.

We have a back and forth about this and the discussion ends when he says something to the effect of “Just Shut Up and Do What I told You” (Maybe he said “Shut Up and do your job”, I just remember hearing “Shut Up”).

Whatever you say!

Alright?

Fine, if that’s the way you want to do it, can you send me an email with those instructions please?

Normally I would work at my normal work pace but that day specifically I was flying through accounts.

I am not sure how many people I deactivated, I was cutting people off left, right and centre.

I went home that night and knew that there would be fallout, and I felt incredibly guilty for negatively affecting the honest customers that were caught in the crossfire of my supervisor’s bull.

Because I was part time, and only working 3 days a week, I wouldn’t see the fallout for 4 more days.

When I got back to work the situation was apparently complete chaos.

Told ya so!

The entire department had spent the 4 days that I was off trying to reactivate people, and they wouldn’t be finished for a couple more days still.

I had heard rumours that some people, important people, had threatened lawsuits and all sorts of other bs as a result of being cut off when they had purchased plans advertised with “Unlimited Data In the USA”.

The supervisor / manager tried to blame me but I had the email and witnesses to our conversation to back me up.

IDK if the supervisor got in trouble over this incident, nothing happened to me over this incident.

I do know that he was eventually promoted to being the General Manager of the call centre and subsequently fired years later when we brought in a union over the bad working conditions.”

Here’s how folks reacted on Reddit.

This reader spoke up.

Another Reddit user shared their thoughts.

This individual nailed it.

Another person spoke up.

And this Reddit user weighed in.

Some people just shouldn’t be in charge…of anything…ever.

Why are so many of them managers?

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.