Upper management can take advantage of employees in some pretty slick ways, but clever employees can get the last laugh.

Read how one Redditor’s past position included skirting around time manipulation. Thankfully, this employee came up with a plan.

See how it all went down below.

So you want to know everything I do in a day? Fine

This happened some fifteen years ago, but a recent post on here reminded me.

I once worked in a municipal archive as an employee of a contractor company, as in, the city contracted the firm, and they contracted me and a few other people to do the work.

We had an abandoned cinema full of pallets, each with a mountain of file boxes we had to index and catalogue, since the archive had been unattended for something like 30 years.

But this worker needed the money — so they were ready for it.

Of course, they gave us the worst contract they legally could and paid us literal peanuts for a high-qualification job with legal responsibility, but I was young and needed the money.

So, our bosses got paid per job, but we got paid monthly.

They wanted the job done as quickly as possible so they could take another one and started pressuring us to do a sloppy job in order to finish quickly.

And you’ll never believe how they decided to mount the pressure on the workers.

They were in a different city, and their latest idea was to call us on the phone every day two minutes before our time to go to ask what had we done that day and pressure us.

The calls would go for maybe half an hour, making us late.

We were in a remote town with horrible transport connections, and we didn’t drive, so if we didn’t go out on time, we’d have to wait hours for the next bus, plus an hour-and-a-half bus ride home.

I guess the idea was to punish us and hope we’ll go quicker so they won’t “need” to extend the call to pressure us. BUT they didn’t want to admit to (I guess they legally couldn’t), so they just said they needed to be updated daily.

But this worker had another idea up their sleeve…

Cue malicious compliance:

After the second time they pulled that garbage, I started spending at least the last half an hour of every work day pulling together a very tediously detailed (so.tediously.detailed.so.tediously) written report of everything we did that day and e-mailing it to them at precisely my clockout hour.

Then, when they called, I said, “Don’t worry, you have the daily update in your inbox. It took me half an hour, now it’s my time to go home. Bye,” and hung up.

Of course, work got delayed by at least half an hour each day, but what could they do? I was strictly complying with their request for information, in writing, and with every little detail so they don’t need to remember.

And legally, in Spain, they couldn’t fire us without justification unless they canceled the project with the city.

Surprisingly, the employee heard from them again in the future.

They did call me back for a different project, but when they realized I wouldn’t stand for other garbage they tried to pull, they actually canceled the project and “let me go.”

They had the gall to still promise to call me for another one “soon”.

What does Reddit think of this company’s unique way of running things? Let’s read the comments below to find out more.

One Redditor called it like they saw it.

Another person wanted to know if the “peanuts” mentioned were actual peanuts.

One reader congratulated the OP on their genius plan.

And finally, someone else from Spain was familiar with this type of behavior.

A company behaving in this way is a major red flag.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.