Safety is super important in the workplace.

Imagine having a job where you collect shopping carts in a store parking lot. This could get pretty dangerous!

The employee in this story has a job like that, and when he’s told to file safety reports, he does as instructed.

Management had no idea how many safety reports he was going to file!

Let’s see how this story plays out.

You need me to file safety reports? You got it!

As a bit of context to understand the story, I work at a big box retail store.

Over the past few months, they’ve decided to weigh a more heavy emphasis on store safety.

Where to find safety tips, how to do things safely, and also how to file safety reports.

There’s two people on the security and safety team.

One of these people is friends with him.

It was around the last month that they really started cracking down on making sure that everyone in the entire store knew how to file a safety report.

And the safety guy would spend a decent amount of time going around the store and quizzing people on how to file them and also other safety related things.

And as a sidenote that will become important later, I am pretty good friends with him.

He doesn’t have the safest job.

Once I was taught how to do it, my non-malicious compliance began.

Normally, working in retail, you do your job perfectly and there’s no real need to file any sort of safety report because nothing bad happens.

But with my special case I like to put it as, “most others can do their jobs perfectly and be safe, but as the cart attendant I can do my job perfectly and still get run over by a truck.”

He filed a lot of safety reports.

Anyone who has worked in retail can confirm just how stupid customers can be at times.

Now when you put them behind the wheel of a multi-ton vehicle, things can get very dangerous very quickly if you don’t keep your guard up.

And so the safety reports begin to pile in from me.

Typically it was about two per week.

Here’s an example of the type of safety issue OP encountered.

Most of the reports came from having to make a turn or cross through an intersection in the parking lot.

I would be stopped waiting for a safe opportunity to continue, a vehicle would come to a stop, I would begin to continue moving carts, and then the car would suddenly start moving and narrowly avoid hitting me and/or my row of carts.

And so, I would just file these nearly missed accidents.

I never really thought much of it.

He was exceeding the safety report quota.

That is until we had a safety huddle for the entire store.

That is when the a leader had announced that their quota for safety reports for the whole store was one or two a week.

For me, it hit that in the past two weeks from the safety reports that only I had made, not accounting for the other employees who were also filing.

I was effectively giving the store its quota that it needed.

He found the situation funny and told his friend.

I just thought it was funny, and later on that day told the safety guy about it.

In our conversation, he told me that I was actually filing so many safety reports that the head of the store actually got mad at him because I was filing so many of them.

As he put it, “they told me to teach you guys how to file safety reports, and here you are filing legitimate safety reports. I don’t know why they’re mad.“

As we later put it, management quite doesn’t recognize how dangerous it is to be in the parking lot.

Time to file even more safety reports!

By this time, I had turned in my two weeks notice for separate reasons, but he gave me a new drive.

Just the knowledge that I was effectively taking blows at upper management just by doing exactly what they wanted me to do was enough to switch from normal compliance to malicious compliance.

Because the parking lot is practically my domain, nearly missed accidents are abound for me.

In the time since then, I still made about three or four safety filings.

He barely started working and had to file another safety report.

Today was my third to last day that I am scheduled to work at the store.

Typical idiot drivers were abound, and I wind up making a safety report an hour into my shift.

I don’t think too much of it, other than the fact that maybe some management is infuriated that I’m doing exactly what I should, again.

The head of security wanted the safety reports to stop.

Later on, I noticed the head of security and safety had left their office and was coming in my general direction.

Because I was right next to the registers at the time, I thought that something else was going on.

Just gave him a typical greeting, but was surprised when he came towards and stopped.

He said to me, “hey, if you ever have any more (safety filings) that deal with vehicles, just come to me or (safety guy) and report it to us directly.“

As soon as he left, I felt a sense of victory.

Again, he found this hilarious!

My compliance, in both malicious and non-malicious forms, was too much for management and they finally buckled under the weight of my safety report filings.

I was almost laughing at the thought.

I told a few coworkers about it, and all of them agreed with me that it was hilarious.

The guy with the most dangerous job just got asked to stop making safety reports on the most dangerous aspect of their job because they were filing so many.

He’s glad to be leaving this job.

As I said before, I already have my two weeks in and I only have two more working days to go, so I don’t really care that this feels unusual and not right.

I’m just happy to move on to a new job.

And in case if anyone is wondering, yes, I did have to go to the head of safety and security during my shift today because someone almost hit the cart pusher later on in my shift.

I never thought about how dangerous it is for employees who push carts in parking lots.

This store needs to take the reports seriously and implement some safety measures instead of telling the person in danger to stop submitting the reports.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

Corporate doesn’t really care about employee safety.

It is weird that there’s a quota.

He should tell OSHA.

He gave an update in a comment that he is going to tell OSHA.

It’s better to be safe than sorry!

But maybe not when it requires a report.

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.