I guess those Geek Squad folks really are pretty smart, huh?

Well, at least that’s the impression I got after reading this story from Reddit!

Get all the details below.

We think you’ll be impressed!

Agent Johnny Utah saves the Geek Squad team at Best Buy.

“I was in my early 20s and working at a Best Buy in the electronics department.

I wasn’t a Geek Squad member but I would help them out occasionally because I was very computer literate.

Their workload was pretty large, so they needed all the help they could get.

Back then Best Buy would do this thing to computers called “optimization” which was an extra charge for anyone purchasing a new unit.

Essentially, the Geek Squad agents at the store would have to remove the bloatware and add in some Best Buy features to make the computer faster and more reliable.

Bloatware does suck but we weren’t supposed to say to the customers, “You can remove whatever you want at home for free. You don’t have to pay us or have to wait for your computer.”

Upsell, baby!

We were supposed to sell them optimization, insurance, extras, all that. Same old shtick.

Well one day someone in the higher echelons of authority got the idea that we should have a quota for number of computers optimized.

That way we would always have optimized versions ready, so people wouldn’t have to wait. As in, “You must optimize X number of computers every week so that we can tell corporate we’ve optimized a bunch of computers.”

There was a whole process for this.

Now at that point it was a little easier to optimize the computers because the Geek Squad would take the brand new computer to the back area out of customer view, hook the computer up to a remote connection, and let someone in India do all the work.

In fact, we could sit there and watch them do the work right on the monitor.

We didn’t know these workers.

So we called them by their code name: Agent Johnny Utah.

There were several problems with the quota, the biggest of which was that we couldn’t optimize every single computer in the store.

We did have issues where customers wanted to buy a brand new computer and all we had left were optimized versions which they didn’t want to pay an extra charge for.

So we had to sell them the “upgraded” version for the regular price.

The other problem was that it still took time to go move the metal stairs to the back, grab a computer from inventory, unbox and set it up to remote access, double-check Johnny Utah’s work, label it optimized, and return it to the shelf.

To be running this process all day added a not small amount of labor.

So what did our team do?

Well it was easy:

Once Agent Johnny Utah was done optimizing a computer, the Geek Squad member on duty reset that exact same computer to factory settings, and had him optimize it again.

And again.

And again. Ad infinitum.

Oh, boy…

Literally from open to close of business every day, some guy in India would be performing the same tweaks on the same computer, having his work erased, and then did it all again.

I don’t know how much the remote workers were paid and I don’t know what they were really thinking at all. But someone, somewhere at one point probably “optimized” the exact same desktop computer maybe 50 times.

To my knowledge, the Geek Squad at our store was good about keeping at least a few optimized computers on the shelf, while reporting their quota as higher.

And if a manager ever asked how it was going, they could always point to the computer in the back on the shelf being worked on remotely at any point in the day.

Hilarious!

In classic fashion, no one in management really bothered to check their exact numbers and the Geek Squad could always use Johnny Utah as a reference that they had indeed made him optimize a lot of systems.

That job was honestly a massive dumpster fire and this was probably the least interesting thing to happen while I worked there but definitely the best example of malicious compliance by far.”

Let’s see how readers reacted.

This person shared a story.

Another individual spoke up.

This person chimed in.

Another reader shared their thoughts.

And this person spoke up.

That’s one way to do it!

I doubt they really learned their lesson, though.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a customer who insists that their credit card works, and finds out that isn’t the case.