Having an overbearing boss demand you to do something you know is not a good idea is a common experience in ‘corporate hell’.

In this case, a man was told to print an entire website… A government website. Do you know how massive those are?!

Well, he obliged, knowing full well this would classify as malicious compliance.

Read the story and see what happened.

Print out the internet? Yes Ma’am!

This is about a decade ago, but still well within the realm of the internet.

I was a technical writer for the government and had slowly been transferring our old employee handbook (think government bureaucracy from the 1940s) into a modern and actually useful doc (think one page with our policies and links to useful websites, like Office of Personnel Management, forms for workman’s comp, etc.).

My boss wanted the whole thing printed out, on her desk the next morning.

He didn’t know she meant it quite literally yet.

This was Monday of the Thanksgiving weekend.

I printed out the 200 or so pages and just had the links to the various websites in bold.

This took about an hour, and I left it on her desk before going home that night.

She calls me in her office on Tuesday afternoon and proceeds to yell at me at how stupid I am, do I think people can just go to a website when it is on paper?

No. I need to PRINT everything out.

He tried to reason with her and make everything clear.

I calmly tell her that these sites are pretty dense and deep and it would be about 10,000 pages.

She says she does not care, it needs to be ON HER DESK DAMMIT first thing Monday morning.

Mind you, this is now Tuesday and we usually had some of Wednesday off.

I was not really planning to work Thursday Thanksgiving or Friday, as I had applied for leave and was looking forward to a nice relaxing long weekend.

She did not care.

I don’t have family, but I had plans.

But ok.

I asked for, and got the request to have “everything pertaining to the employee handbook online in a printed format.”

I also had real work and real deadlines.

But he had to oblige for many reasons.

A quick bit of context: She was my boss, she did my performance appraisals and she could make my life miserable and possibly fire me.

However, my clients were teams that put together engineering plans, biological assessments, scientific journal articles, reports to Congress, etc. that had real-world deadlines.

On some of these, if you missed the publication date, your agency paid $100,000 a day in delay fees.

Or you would annoy a congressperson, which is never a good idea.

And I was really getting sick and tired of my boss’s requests that took me away from my actual work.

He did what she requested pronto.

So I was printing and printing all the rest of Tuesday afternoon, and then Wednesday. I had to go to the site, print, click on the next link, print, etc.

On Wednesday, we got a congressional (a letter from a congress critter that was actually important).

Had we not gotten that, I might not have done what I did… I got overtime approved pronto to take care of this request.

So I did work Thanksgiving.

As I was doing that, I kept on printing.

And printing.

Since his boss didn’t seem to care about the resources necessary for doing this, why would he?

I used up every sheet of paper in our 14-story building.

I kept on researching the response for the congressional, printing, going to the next floor to carefully get that packet of paper to tuck under the appropriate page, etc.

I had paper in about 20 different conference rooms.

I could have done the congressional in about 8 hours.

BUT it was not due until Monday.

And all of this printing took me a good 24 hours of work. So I put in for 32 hours (Thurs, Fri, Sat, and Sun).

Got it done.

It was something to behold.

This is now two stacks of paper, each about 6 feet high.

I was waaaay under in my estimate of 10,000 pages as it was more like about 30,000.

(Remember, I had at least 5 printers going at once for 4 days etc.).

I put this in my boss’s office (which was already none too clean and pristine).

I got written up, with a disciplinary hearing and everything.

The charge was …. malicious compliance.

I kept my job only because I did have her request in an email.

This is why you should have everything in email.

Let’s read some Reddit comments.

A reader shares their thoughts.

I heard she got promoted.

This commenter shares a similar experience.

Another reader chimes in.

Yup.

Someone shares another similar story.

His boss put him in an impossible situation, but he came out on top (of a 6 feet high pile of paper).

Good for him.

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.