If you worked for a bank and were sent to another branch to shadow the people who worked there, you probably would think that would involve a lot of sitting around, observing and taking notes.

You probably wouldn’t think you’d need to wear your gym shoes.

In today’s story, one bank employee knows that being shadowed means his job is on the line, so he goes out of his way to make life extra difficult for the guy shadowing him.

Let’s see what he does.

You want to time every ticket I do with a person shadowing me? OK.

As a tech of going on 30 years I’ve seen some stupid management directives.

This one is one of my favorites.

Back in 2007 I worked for a large bank that is based in Atlanta and I worked in Richmond in a 28 story office tower.

My primary job was desktop support and fixing phones.

At that time I was very athletic, I moved fast all the time and hated to use the elevator.

If I had to go less than 6 floors – I took the stairs.

His boss was okay with him using the stairs instead of the elevator.

My boss didn’t care, for as a team we were the most efficient team in the company as far as # of tickets worked each week per tech.

We worked smart, not hard.

So upper management in Atlanta decides one day to do a deep assessment on how ALL the techs in the bank did our job.

My team gets a visit from Atlanta one day in the form of a heavy set guy who says he will be shadowing us to see how we did our job.

They were not happy that he was there.

He was a bit of an condescending jerk too in his attitude.

He even had a stop watch to time us.

Now we all knew right away what was happening – Management wanted to outsource us so they needed to know what we did, how long it took and what we used so they could put a cost on it before soliciting for bids.

Lets just say my team was not thrilled about it.

He wasn’t going to go easy on this guy.

Now I decided to be a smart alec about this and my team knew what I had planned for this “event”.

I was told this overweight condescending jerk was to shadow us and time us.

OK – he is going to have to keep up.

Time for Malicious compliance.

He knew exactly what to do.

I ONLY used the stairs.

Our lab was on the 20th floor.

A typical morning for me would be like this: I’d run a desktop monitor ticket to the 6th floor, then go back to 20 to get my phone bag to go to lower level 1 to the IPX to hook up a phone then go to the 14th floor to test the phone then up to 22 to fix a printer then down to 7 to look at a laptop.

Today – I’m ONLY doing the stairs so this guy was about to have a heart attack trying to keep up with me while I did my job.

The guy couldn’t keep up.

I took no pity on him and didn’t even pay attention to him.

As far as I was concerned this jerk was assisting others in having my job eliminated.

At some point I’d lost him in the stairwell.

Later my boss says to me the guy was a bit mad for me taking the stairs but my boss told him – “That is how my tech works and he is one of my best. If you can’t keep up – that is your problem.”

(To this day I have said she was the BEST boss I’ve ever had)

That job didn’t last much longer.

Later I find out what I did got back to upper management in Atlanta.

They were mad yet they could not punish me for I was doing my job and did it very well.

The story also got around to other techs and they thought it was funny as hell what I did.

In April 2008 we found out we were outsourced. Just like we knew it was going to happen.

I no longer work there.

I love that his boss defended him, but it’s too bad they lost their jobs in the end.

For the guy shadowing him, that was probably the worst day of his life!

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

There was no way for him to win.

This is a good question.

This would’ve made life easier for the guy shadowing him.

Here’s a good warning.

Gotta have coffee.

I’m sure that guy regretted shadowing him!

Too bad, so sad.

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.