Imagine having a job you love so much that you gladly go above and beyond just because you like your job so much.

What would you do if the company policies and a customer complaint resulted in the company firing you? Would you fight it, or would you take what was rightfully yours?

That’s the situation in this story, and firing a rock star employee really backfires!

Check out how this horrible company collapsed!

Fire me because I did my job? Okay. Hope you don’t need all of these supplies.

I love taking photos of people. To the point that I have two resumes for applying for jobs and one of them is specifically for photography work.

So I was psyched when I got a job in a photo studio!

He was so grateful for this job!

It was a chain and it wasn’t like high quality work, but it was still awesome.

I took a lot of photos of very cute babies in particular.

Well the company had a three strike policy. Once there were three issues with you, you were gone. They made you sign off on every single one of the reports.

It didn’t matter how much later it was that you got your next strike, they never went away.

Okay.

This is where it gets tricky.

Doesn’t seem like a great business model but okay. And being fair, I did get two strikes which were very reasonable.

One day I missed work because I forgot to set an alarm. It was a super irregular schedule and it wasn’t always easy to keep track of. Mea Culpa.

The next strike happened because I scheduled a photoshoot for before the beginning of a shift accidentally.

The program was supposed to only show you times that an employee would be available for doing photoshoots, and they changed our hours with very little warning, so the photoshoot that I had scheduled the week before that would have been within our hours was no longer.

He was simply trying to help the clients out!

I felt super bad for the mom and daughter who came in early for their photos and helped them sort everything out with a free photo redemption in apology.

I still got my second strike for that.

Now the last strike… I actually got two on the same day.

Around Christmas, our store goes nuts. We have to have twice as many people working in order to keep everything in order.

During that, I was training a new employee, and helping with her photoshoots and my own and running cash and taking passport photos and teaching her the rules for them and and and-

It was a nightmare.

Things got bad!

What made it worse was that one customer submitted two complaints that day about me.

See, this customer felt I was pushing her to buy photos: Literally all this company cares about is pushing the photo packages and I was instructed relentlessly to do it more and with more energy because I didn’t make enough people feel they had to have them.

So. Great. I convinced a customer to spend money instead of just giving them free things and not getting a dollar from them. Like the company was always yelling at me to do. And I got a complaint for that. Great.

And then the other complaint was even more ludicrous- The customer felt I was being too bossy with the other photographer.

The one that I was training.

UH OH…

The one that didn’t know how to do the job yet so I had to tell her how to do things.

Apparently I deserved to be fired for telling her how to do things.

I was heartbroken.

It’s been a few years now so I’ve gotten over it, but I was so happy working as a photographer.

Time to turn the tables.

But here’s where the malicious compliance finally kicks in. See, by my nature, I end up doing a lot of work that isn’t actually my job because I want to help.

I enjoy feeling useful.

But they’re firing me because they don’t want me to sell things, or train people, like they had told me to do. So for the last two weeks of my job-

She did things differently.

I stopped counting all of the money for deposits. That was the manager’s job even though she hadn’t done it in half a year since making me do it. This meant she had to come in on days that she didn’t work just to do the deposit.

I stopped actively recruiting customers, which is what you’re supposed to do in your down time, cold call previous customers and prowl around the attached mall for people you can convince to get photos.

(The best tactic was always to find people with new young ones, tell them how beautiful their baby is, offer them a free print of one of the photos after a shoot. Almost no one passes that up because then they have a wonderful photo to hold on to. I didn’t feel guilty doing it because it genuinely makes people happy.)

I stopped taking meticulous notes of every interaction that was worth following up on.

He started being extra careful!

I used to make a note for the next shift about how x customer had seemed interested but was unconvinced and that a simple reminder of the offer would probably be enough to get them to buy.

Or I would make a note about someone who forgot their passport photos and whether or not they had paid already.

And then on my last day, the truest malicious compliance happened.

They wanted me gone. Okay. I took my name tag and packed it away.

I went into the photo studio and grabbed the kids toys I had brought in to help get young ones to cooperate. (Babies don’t really understand a stranger saying smile for the camera- but if you shake a rattle at them and make silly faces, they’re very good at smiling for that.)

He did everything he was supposed to do!

I cleaned up all of the things I had laid out neatly for easy preparation, and put them back in storage.

I cleaned up the counters to get rid of all of the notes and passport photos that weren’t claimed that day because that was what we were technically supposed to do.

And then came the real part that this title refers to-

Over my nine months working there, a number of issues had come up with the things we worked with. For the passport photos we needed a paper trimmer to slice off the edges quickly and neatly.

We had one when I started- and then it broke. I brought in a replacement. It got broken too. Still, we needed one, so I brought in another replacement.

OOPS!

We also had gotten our stapler stolen. No worries, I had one at home we could use. And the keys to the storage, the extra receipt paper, the passport paper, where we keep the deposits, where we keep our paper files- they were tiny.

And the colour of them was so bland that throughout the course of the day, they would get lost easily thirty times. I had bought a large blue fluffy keychain to attach to it with permission from the boss.

Never lost the keys again, not one of us.

We had also had a sign when I started there which we could pop out which said “I’m in a photoshoot, please be patient I’ll be with you in a moment.” Or something along those lines. Because there was often only one employee at a time and they had to do the photoshoots and all of the passport photo drop ins.

He messed up again!

Well my boss accidentally dumped her coffee on that sign after she tripped one day. So I went out of the way to get a new one printed, bought a plastic sleeve for it, and set it up with a cardboard backing so it wouldn’t break or get ruined.

It was better than the old one.

So of course, when I left, I took my sign, my keychains, my paper trimmer, my stapler, my toys, and notably, my shutter button.

See the camera had a shutter button attached that would allow you to move about while snapping photos.

Again, helped with little ones because they don’t understand directions so you have to be able to physically draw their attention somewhere.

He did everything he could to keep things going!

This cord had gotten frayed and not replaced. It shocked me nasty enough to leave a burn, so I took it off the camera and brought my own in.

I got a call the next day asking me how dare I steal the companies’ supplies.

I calmly replied that I had just taken back the items that belonged to me and that they could keep the broken paper trimmer that I had brought in. I even left them a pair of scissors I brought for a back up when the first paper cutter broke. I even brought them a box of paperclips for using since they didn’t have a stapler anymore.

The cherry on top!

The store closed down not two months later.

Crazy how when you fire your hardest worker over things that you told them to do (and one missed shift, mea culpa) other employees are less than enthused about the chance of the same thing happening.

And no one else worked nearly as hard to keep everything in the black as I did. (Not to say there’s anything wrong with that, I liked everyone except the manager since it was only two other employees and they did their work well and treated me nicely. They just had a better sense of doing what they were paid for and nothing else.)

And for reference?

They simply had weird policies!

The employee who the customer felt I was treating badly?

Looked at our manager like she was insane and asked when I had done that because she knew for a fact that the only time I raised my voice at either herself or the only other employee, was because it was too loud for them to hear me otherwise.

She apologized to me, said that she was worried it was her fault because she had been a little nervous that day because she was dealing with other things, and was worried that the customer had gotten the wrong impression because of that.

Said employee then went on to have her own gallery show, leaving shortly after I was fired.

GEEZ! That’s so weird!

Those policies really backfired. They definitely lost their best employee over a customer complaining about nothing.

Let’s find out what folks on Reddit think about this one.

This user just doesn’t get the three strike policy!

That’s right! This user wants everyone to be careful with legal records.

This user knows these policies are embarrassing.

This user knows one should never bring personal items for company use.

This user is happy that this horrible company went out of business.

They lost their best employee.

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.