Some people get a taste of authority and immediately let it go to their head.

What would you do if a new boss insisted on micromanaging your job, even when it made no sense?

Would you push back and risk conflict?

Or would you follow orders and let them learn the hard way?

In the following story, one soldier uses a bit of harmless military-grade malicious compliance to show their new officer why experience often matters more than rank.

Here’s what happened.

Notify you for every report? Have fun waking up 50 times a night

Some background: I spent most of my military service in a ‘communications command and control center’ (CC for short), which isn’t as glorious as it sounds.

It was mostly emails and Excel.

Our CC was relatively high in the command chain; we were more ‘big picture’ managers of the operability of communication systems across the whole military.

The ones actually doing the work in the CC are enlisted soldiers, but because the work was relatively important, the commander of the CC was always an officer.

At the time of this story, I was an E3 (enlisted soldier, 3rd rank), and I had a lot of time and experience on the job.

Things were all good until the new commander showed up.

One day, we got a new commander, an O1 fresh out of officer school.

She had a really bad ‘I’m an officer, you must respect me’ attitude. I spent more time than her in the army, I was also older, and my work involved interacting with officers with much higher ranks than hers, so I didn’t give a care, but I tried playing nice.

Our work at the CC had a pretty normal procedure; we’d get some report, say “maintenance A starting”, something like that, would usually be filed away immediately because we knew about it ahead of time, and they usually didn’t affect anything.

A report like “Someone dug through a fiber optic cable and a whole post lost internet connection” would usually lead to us making some phone calls trying to understand if there are backups, who could fix it, and when, and lastly, when we had all of the relevant info, we would notify our commander.

She had her own ideas about how things should go.

She didn’t care about that procedure. She wanted to be involved and assert her control.

One day, she saw a report on one of our computers that we hadn’t notified her about yet, so she got really angry and said, “From now on, you are to notify me about every report!”

Big mistake.

The CC worked 24/7, but there was only one commander, so if something really important came up, we would wake her up in the middle of the night, but most stuff was kept to the morning.

Eventually, she learned her lesson.

Well, that night the night shift woke her up about 10 times, and they were being nice. The day after, she was visibly sleep-deprived.

I was on the next night shift and called her for EVERY report. Sometimes, we’d get multiples a minute.

She was basically doing the night shift with me.

At around 5 AM, she said, “Fine, you don’t have to report everything; you know what’s important and what’s not.”

So, for the conclusion, I’m gonna steal u/CaptMaxius ‘s line- “outrank doesn’t mean out-know.” Let your subordinates do their job.

Sheesh! She should’ve seen that coming.

Let’s take a look at what Reddit readers have to say about this situation.

This is funny.

It sounds like this guy didn’t mind getting woke up at all.

Very similar.

Here’s another good saying!

Good for them!

She needed to get off her high horse because an attitude like that won’t last long in that position.

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.