Doesn’t it drive you nuts when your bosses change the rules on you…and the new rules are BAD?

It’s enough to drive an employee crazy!

But all you can do is comply, right?

Or…maliciously comply!

Check out how this worker handled it!

Follow the old rule? If you say so, boss!

“As part of my job, I have to travel occasionally (roughly 5-6 times a year) for periods ranging from 3 days to 2 weeks.

There are rules…

When that is the case, everything (plane ticket + hotel + food) is covered by my job under the following rule : I need to pay for everything out of pocket first,

I keep the receipts, then submit them to the admin/billing department who approves the expenses and gives me back the amount in my following paycheck.

However, about 6 months ago, everyone received an email from the higher ups stating a change in rules : from now on, every food-related expense didn’t need to be justified anymore.

Whatever you say…

We would instead receive a fixed amount of money per meal (which totalled to around 80-90$ per day, very generous I would say) and would be allowed to pocket whatever isn’t used.

The goal was to lighten the pressure on the billing department, because they were spending too much of their time checking every single receipt for every travel.

Time is money, so by doing this they were planning on reducing costs.

As soon as I read that I was ecstatic, because I knew I was always spending much less than the allowed amount per day.

That would mean that I was going to get free extra money.

Okay…

However, my excitement was short-lived.

Not even an hour after that first email, another email came from my direct supervisor that stated that “we will continue to follow the old rules, please disregard the previous email.”

After talking to some of my colleagues we realized that our supervisor thought the amount we were allowed under the new rule was too high, and he was trying to save money off us by making us stick to the old rule.

So you want to save money and disregard the higher up’s rules?

Okay, let’s play. The first trip I went to after that email, I did the following :

– 8am : light breakfast at the hotel, but then coffee at the shop across the street

-10am : I’m feeling a bit peckish, let’s get a banana from the supermarket, and a small pastry from the bakery next door. And let’s not forget a bottle of water from this kiosk nearby

-12pm : lunch at the restaurant, but I took the dessert in a tea room close by and my noon coffee at the Star of bucks

-4pm : time for a little snack, let’s get a chocolate bar at the grocery store and a boba tea in that little store there

7pm : time for a pre-dinner drink at the local pub

8pm : dinner at a restaurant

9pm : let’s not forget the water bottle for the night.

This was going to be interesting…

I did this for the whole week I was traveling, making sure that for each day I spent as close as possible to the amount I was allowed to spend.

So when I came back, instead of submitting around 20 receipts (three a day), I submitted around 150.

And submitting the receipts was quite a long process as they were asking for a lot of information for each single one.

The amount in local currency, conversion rate from my credit card, corresponding amount in my currency, address of the establishment, short description of the purchase, etc.

And I did this on company time of course, which took over 3 hours to complete.

Just following the rules!

Once I finished submitting all of these, I received a panicked email from the billing department asking me why I submitted so many receipts and didn’t follow the new rule.

I forwarded them the email from my supervisor, saying that I was only following what I was told.

One of my friends in admin told me that the billing department actually went through all my receipts, which took them a huge amount of time.

My supervisor got a stern talking to from the higher ups, and from then on we were allowed to disregard all the food receipts.”

Check out what Reddit users said about this.

This reader had a lot to say.

Another person shared their thoughts.

This individual didn’t hold back.

Another Reddit user spoke up.

And this reader shared how it works Down Under.

Stupid is as stupid does…

This is a classic revenge story.

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