Some office policies are so illogical that following them to the letter is the best way to prove a point.

What would you do if your job required you to travel most of the day, but you were still assigned office kitchen duty?

Would you ignore it and risk getting in trouble?

Or would you show up and do the job exactly as instructed?

In the following story, an IT support specialist finds himself dealing with this very situation.

Here’s what he chose to do.

Kitchen-duty

At some point, I was working on IT support for a municipality, traveling around and fixing incidents and fulfilling requests.

My team was at the office a varying amount, but I would say 80-100% traveling between tasks.

As many who work in offices probably have experience… the kitchen is always a mess.

Coffee cups and plates are just lying around.

We had even bought an industrial dishwasher with easy-to-load trays: one for plates, one for bowls, and one for cups and glasses.

But people are stupid or lazy and put things on the bench or in the wrong tray.

A genius found out that we need a rotating «kitchen duty» plan.

Everyone has one day when they are responsible for the kitchen.

This wasn’t a kitchen for making food; it was basically just a coffee machine, fridge, and microwave.

He tried to reason with the person, but they weren’t listening.

The list came out, and I saw my team on it.

So I immediately contacted the ones responsible and explained that my team is traveling most of the day.

We are rarely at the office and usually grab lunch while traveling, so we shouldn’t be on the list.

They replied that «everyone will be on the list.»

So again, I raised the issue that we’re not at the office, and I got a reply saying we’ll just have to come to the office to take our responsibility.

Here, my malicious compliance kicks in.

My day comes up, so I go to the office, turn on an audiobook, and take my place in the kitchen.

Whenever someone came into the kitchen to place something on the counter, I would make a noise, pointing to the trays.

If they put it wrong, I would point to the picture of where to place the thing.

It didn’t take long for the boss to see the problem.

I did this for 7 hours that day.

I was asked about my workload, to which I replied that I had a lot to do.

However, I had kitchen duty, so I wouldn’t be able to go out to any of the incidents.

After the second time I did this, and the big boss asked questions, the list was finally changed, and my team was removed! 😀

The person responsible for the list still thought it was unfair that we didn’t have to do kitchen duty.

Yikes! It’s amazing how some people just refuse to listen.

Let’s see what the readers over at Reddit think about this story.

Of course, the cleaning lady would notice.

This person gets it.

For this person, they would take the break.

According to this person, their college roommates tried this with them.

What an unfair system!

Rather than what they did, everyone should just be responsible for cleaning up after themselves. Geez!

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.