Some managers think control equals efficiency, but sometimes, it just leads to chaos.

What would you do if your boss turned a simple task into an overcomplicated nightmare? Would you play along and deal with the hassle? Or would you find a way to make them realize just how ridiculous their system is?

In the following story, one department finds themselves facing this exact dilemma. Here’s how they handled it.

Malicious compliance?

I used to work at a mid-sized company where our department had its own supply closet.

Everyone knew the rules: take what you need, don’t hoard, and keep the area tidy.

Simple enough, right? Apparently, not for our new micromanaging office manager, “Karen.”

Karen sounds too meticulous.

Karen was obsessed with cutting costs.

She’d swoop in like a hawk every morning, inspecting the supply closet. If a box of pens was a little lighter or the Post-its weren’t perfectly aligned, we’d get a stern email about “unnecessary consumption.”

She even implemented a sign-out sheet for supplies.

Want a highlighter? Better justify it in writing.

Why is Karen giving herself extra work?

One day, Karen decided to escalate.

She put a lock on the supply closet and declared herself the sole key holder. If anyone needed something, they had to email her and wait for her to “approve” the request.

This was, of course, on top of her other duties, so getting a new pen could take hours.

Needless to say, productivity started to suffer.

Tom had a great idea.

Cue malicious compliance.

A coworker of mine, “Tom,” was a bit of a prankster but always stayed within the rules.

He decided to test Karen’s new system to its limits.

Every time he needed anything, no matter how small, he emailed Karen. Need a single paperclip? Email. Need to replace a dried-out marker? Email. Stapler jammed? You guessed it: email.

Tom’s meticulousness inspired the rest of us.

Under Karen’s new rule, approvals started taking days.

Soon, the entire department was flooding Karen’s inbox with individual requests.

Since Karen insisted on handling every single one personally, she quickly became overwhelmed.

Approving requests started taking days instead of hours. Meetings were delayed because people didn’t have notebooks. Presentations stalled because someone was waiting for a dry-erase marker.

The situation escalated.

Management started noticing the bottleneck.

Our department’s performance metrics were plummeting, and everyone pointed the finger at the supply chain fiasco.

Karen tried to defend her system, claiming we were being wasteful and needed “structure,” but the evidence was clear: her micromanagement was backfiring.

She really embarrassed herself.

After a particularly disastrous week, upper management stepped in.

They not only revoked Karen’s authority over the supply closet but also gave her a formal reprimand.

The lock was removed, the sign-out sheet disappeared, and we went back to the honor system.

Karen, humiliated, kept a low profile after that.

As for us? We may have “lost” a week of productivity, but the petty satisfaction of watching Karen drown in her own bureaucracy was worth every second.

Wow! That whole system fell apart pretty quickly.

Let’s check out how the readers over at Reddit relate to a coworker like this.

In most cases, this is actually true.

Lucky for the company.

This person turned a locked supply closet into a game.

Here’s a similar experience but with medical supplies.

The policy was such a joke.

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.