What would you do if you knew your boss was going to fire you so he could hire someone else to do your job? You’d probably be pretty upset.

That’s the situation in today’s story, but the accountant who realizes she’s going to get fired has the last laugh when the boss tells her to do something that she knows is a very bad idea.

Let’s see how the story plays out.

Wipe my computer? Sure thing! (you didn’t say anything about saving the important information on it first)

Inspired by a few recent posts, I thought I’d tell the story of malicious compliance committed many years ago by my friend (we’ll call her Samantha) who worked (and still works) as an accountant.

She wasn’t a manager or anything but she had been there for more than 5 years and basically knew so much about how the place ran that she really was a manager in all but title.

She was being demoted even though she was a great employee.

Samantha was told that she would be ‘stepping down’ to a lower position (and therefore lower pay) for “operational and restructuring reasons” but it was really so that the boss’s daughter could replace her.

The boss also told her that she would be responsible for training his daughter, who not only had no accounting qualifications, but had never even held so much as a fast food or retail job.

The boss estimated it would take “several months” to train her.

What went unsaid was the fact Samantha would inevitably be given the boot altogether as soon as her replacement was somewhat competent, so at this point she knew her days there were numbered.

She didn’t comply.

Samantha quite rightly said, “No, if she needs that much training, she’s not fit for the job”, so the boss made life miserable for a few months until she had to quit for her own well-being (which worked out for the best as she had a new job in less than a fortnight).

The day she left, the boss stood over her with his daughter (claiming that she was the new “supervisor”, to add insult to injury) and demanded she wipe her company computer.

Still having some sense of morality (even though this boss didn’t deserve it) Samantha asked if he was sure and that he might want to take some backups from it first.

Before she could finish speaking he yelled over her to “Just get on with it and wipe it clean”.

She shrugged and did as she was told.

The boss really didn’t know what he was asking.

What the boss didn’t realize (or had forgotten) was Samantha had been instructed by him to create social media accounts/pages on various platforms for their accounting company’s branch several years earlier.

Because the boss was paranoid and didn’t want them linked to any of their official company emails for some reason, he’d told her to set them up with her own email account and manage their social media promotion posts in her own name.

Not wanting to do that, she created a new email account through Outlook or whatever and used that instead to set up the accounts on Facebook, Instagram etc.

The boss finally understood the consequences.

Boss called her in a panic about a week after Samantha had quit because his daughter had tried to access the Facebook account so they could post some advertising in the lead up to tax-time, but couldn’t even log in.

Samantha said she no longer had the details of the login credentials/passwords and couldn’t help him.

He said, “You must have written them down somewhere!”

She replied, “Yes, they were in a Notepad document on the desktop of my computer.”

The computer that had been wiped the day she left the company.

I assume there’s a way for them to figure out the password or change it.

Hopefully there were other valuable pieces of information on the computer that also got deleted forever.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

Yes, this is exactly what would happen!

Another person did something similar.

This person knows first hand that people can really be this stupid.

The boss made a lot of big mistakes.

This person thinks the boss was also cruel to his daughter.

The boss made some very bad decisions.

And they came back to bite him.

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.