Some managers are so committed to being right, they don’t even see the disaster they’re building.

So, what would you do if your boss refused to believe the stock system was wrong, no matter how many items were missing?

Would you keep arguing?

Or would you find a way to make those numbers match exactly like they wanted?

In the following story, one group of retail workers found themselves in this exact situation and followed the manager’s orders a little too well.

Here’s how it all happened.

No, the stock take must agree with the system, look again.

Years ago, I worked for an office supplies chain store.

It was an OK job for a student on the weekend.

The store manager would occasionally ask us to do a stock take.

It involved going around with a hand scanner and making sure that what we had in the store agreed with what the computer system said we had.

Unfortunately, we had a lot of theft in the store and so frequently there were missing items, lots of them.

The IT system was also a complete mess so we would frequently find items that the system said we didn’t have.

The store manager was of the firm belief that there was no theft and that the stock system was completely infallible.

If you went up to him and said, “Hey SM, the system reckons we’ve got 37 of these 19″ CRT monitors. I found 3. I think there’s an issue.”

The manager should’ve been more careful with his words.

He’d brush it off and say we weren’t looking hard enough and that we’re not leaving the store until the hand scanner agrees with the stock system….. cue malicious compliance.

We would scan the same monitor multiple times until we had 37 of them.

If we found something that the stock system said we didn’t have, it either got hidden behind the stacks of office paper, on top of one of the offices, or more frequently it would end up inside the paper and card compactor.

We made sure that the hand scanners would always agree with the stock system, and we got to leave the store on time.

A few years later, I found out that the store manager had been fired by the company.

They had done an external audit of the store and found a stock system that said thousands of items weren’t there, and the stock takes must have been falsified.

Yikes! That didn’t end well for him.

Let’s see how the readers over at Reddit feel about it.

Stores doing this never last long.

It seems K-Mart employees used to do something similar.

The manager being fired made this external auditor happy.

This person isn’t wrong.

The manager should’ve known better.

Giving employees an ultimatum like that usually doesn’t end well for anyone.

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.