Sometimes it’s important to follow the rules exactly as stated.

Other times, employees realize that following the rules exactly as stated is more difficult for everyone involved and doesn’t actually help anything.

In today’s story, an oil terminal employee decides to comply with a bank employee’s request to follow the rules exactly as stated, but the bank employee quickly learned not to push that issue again!

Let’s see how the story plays out.

Want all the documents? No problem!

Many, many years ago, I did all kinds of admin work at an oil terminal.

One of my jobs was to take care of the documents after vessels had been loaded.

Bills of Lading would usually have to be couriered to a bank, so I’d take care of that as well.

This isn’t exactly how it worked.

Now, I said Bills of Lading had to be couriered to a bank, but that’s not entirely true.

Every time a vessel would come to load, we’d receive a document distribution matrix.

Originals of document X to be sent to A, copies to B, C and D. Originals of document Y to be sent to B….well, you get the gist.

I would usually completely ignore that matrix.

There was a new employee at the bank.

I knew exactly who needed what and I knew that the bank only cared about the Bs/L. So I’d just send them those and that was never a problem.

That is, until someone new started at said bank and would complain about missing documents.

Next time I added some more documents that I reckoned might be vaguely relevant, but again, they complained about missing documents.

I’m still not sure why that was, only the B/L was relevant to them.

Time for malicious compliance.

But the next time a vessel had loaded, I was very happy to give them exactly what they wanted.

The document distribution matrix was probably once drafted by someone who didn’t know what they were doing, then ignored by everyone, so it never became a problem.

In this case however…I was going to need a bigger envelope.

I followed the matrix to the letter. One original plus four copies? You got it! I was really happy, because I’d spotted the fatal flaw.

One document that was technically supposed to be included was huge!

Some background first: for every chemical product, there is a Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS).

They contain all sorts of information regarding safety of the product and over time they’ve become monstrosities.

So here’s what made me so happy: the matrix also mentioned one original and four copies of the MSDS.

Which was a 250+ page document.

There is absolutely no reason why the bank would need even one copy of the MSDS, but it was in the matrix and I’d been told to follow the matrix.

So I did.

That is a lot of paper!

I printed it five times, copied all other documents four times and ended up with a stack of over 1.500 pages.

Here’s where my sadism kicked in.

The three original Bills of Lading, the only documents I knew the bank actually needed, went randomly into that stack.

The person on the other side would have to go through that entire stack to find those three pieces of paper they really needed.

She only had to do this the one time.

I heard nothing from them.

The next time I had to send documents to the bank again, I reverted to what I’d always sent to them.

Again: silence.

That’s when I knew I’d won. From then on, all was back to normal.

I bet the bank employee wasn’t expecting that much paperwork!

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

Yes, this is probably exactly how it went.

Randomly hiding the important documents was definitely the malicious part.

I hope the new guy had to sort through it and not secretaries.

There’s a term for what OP did.

At least he only had to do it the one time!

Exactly as they planned.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a rude customer who got exactly what they wanted in their pizza.