In addition to a college degree and Excel, corporate workers also often have to learn the bizarre hidden language of workplace hierarchy.

What would you do if your boss tried to co-opt a piece of your personal property?

One man took to Reddit to describe how he handled exactly this.

Here’s what went down.

CEO’s Assistant said it wasn’t right I had a nicer chair than he did

A while back my wife and I were buying our house after a few years of rental.

There was a delay in the new house being ready, so we moved in with my mother for a few weeks.

During that time I stashed some stuff at work, including bringing in my chair, a very nice Herman Miller Aeron I had gotten second hand.

Practical use of it for the interim.

The office chairs were old. Standard/serviceable but not exactly nice.

Ah, seems obvious where this is going.

After a few days, I noticed that my chair would be in the conference room every morning.

No problem, I just wheeled it back to my desk. I was working 8 to 4 to avoid traffic so was usually in first.

Still, not hard to not take what isn’t yours.

The CEO (of about 120 people) would usually not arrive until about noon, and take later meetings when most of the staff were away.

After a few days, the chair kept ending up at his desk.

I’m sure he took their credit as much as he took their chairs too.

(Open plan thankfully, so I just took it back every morning. I wasn’t foolish enough to go into the CEOs office.. ).

He’d shoot me a dirty look every morning, but that was it.

What does he expect if it’s out in the open?

After a few more days of this back and forth, the CEOs assistant (who was a lovely person who I felt immense pity for) approached me and told me that the CEO didn’t think it was appropriate that I had a nicer chair than him.

Sounds like a personal problem.

People would think that my desk belonged to the CEO, and it was stressing her out having to basically fight for it every day on his behalf.

I told her I understood completely, and would stop fighting over it.

Crazy that a chair can cause this much stress.

I took it out of the office that lunch time, and reclaimed a normal office chair.

The next day she came over and asked where the chair was.

I said with an incredibly straight face that I thought since it wasn’t appropriate I just took it to my car.

She had a super stunned look, but just kind of ran off.

I mean, what else did she expect?

Since I was almost always first in I always got parking near the building, pretty much everyone got to walk past my car on the way into the office and see my chair in the boot for a few more weeks, however given his cowardly nature I never got approached about it again.

To this day, I’m 100% certain they thought I was just going to give in and let him have my chair.

Instead I got the joy of telling everyone the honest truth about why my chair was in my car for weeks.

A high-end chair wasting away in a car. Powerful visual.

Let’s see what Reddit thought about this malicious compliance story.

Apparently, stories like these aren’t uncommon.

Though some had higher stakes than others.

Many had ideas on how the CEO should have acted differently.

And commended the original poster.

Apparently these stories extend to more than just chairs.

This gives “take a seat” a whole new meeting.

Epic takedown.

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