There’s a fine line between helpful oversight and micromanagement.

When one lab technician’s new boss dug up an old experiment just to make an example of him, one employee decided to bury him in paperwork instead.

Read on for the full story!

Complying maliciously kinda backfired on me

I work for a startup lab. We are a relatively small operation and usually do contracts with big pharmas and a nearby university.

My new boss worked for a nearby pharma company, and his company does GMP.

As a result, he hates the way we document our experiments here.

It’s puzzling, because one of our clients was his former employer, and they are always okay with it.

So one day, this new boss decides to make an example out of his past work.

One day, he dug up a lab notebook of an experiment I performed like 18 months ago, and used it as an example of how not to document things.

It made me very upset and honestly depressed for a couple of days, so I strived to make him regret doing that.

So he decided to overdocument every little thing.

I went out of my way to document unnecessary details and observations. I turned what was normally a 5-page experiment into 16–17 pages on average.

He’s our boss now, which means he has to check our documentation before we send it to our clients.

This has definitely added to his workload.

I’ve basically turned what was a 30-minute review into a 2-hour review, given that he has to personally check every single website to see if I had the correct CoA, lot number, equipment IDs, etc.

Even my former supervisor thought that I was being childish and petty.

I started seeing him staying late and reviewing my work as I walk out of the building with malicious glee.

But now it’s starting to seem like this new boss is expecting this level of detail.

And it stayed this way for a couple of weeks before he called me in yesterday and told me that he notices me “taking the necessary steps to improve the quality” of my work and that he’s “proud” of me.

Like broooooo what do I even do lol.

It’s actually a massive pain in the behind to do this — should I keep this up?

It’s not often you hear a tale of malicious compliance backfiring like this!

What did Reddit have to say?

Perhaps in this case the act of malicious compliance was just becoming good at their job.

Was this compliance really that malicious?

With enough troubleshooting, they should be able to find a way to make the documentation process less tedious.

This commenter thinks they really did find a way to get back at their boss.

This technician may have had grand ambitions for his malicious compliance, but he ended up just creating more work for himself.

What started as spite soon became standard.

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