Whatever you say, Dad!

Do you remember how satisfying it was to say that when you were a kid and you knew your dad was WRONG?

It was glorious!

And this guy who wrote this story on Reddit knows all about that wonderful feeling…

Check out what he had to say!

“Keep digging until I get back.”

“A long ago in a land a couple hundred miles away, my father wanted to dress up the front corner of our property with a section of decorative fence and a few rose bushes.

Myself, being a tweenage boy and not having the good sense to be somewhere else, was drafted to help him one hot July Saturday afternoon.

We brought the new fence posts to the corner of the lot, along with a shovel and a post hole digger, and set about the task.

This sounds like a lot of fun…

It was a long slow process, as the clay-heavy soil was fairly dry and hard-baked, and as such each hole was taking the better part of 20 minutes to dig.

This definitely wasn’t on the list of things I wanted to spend my afternoon doing, but such is life.

Right about the time we started on the final hole Mom yelled to Dad from the house, announcing that he had a phone call.

As these were the days before mobile phones, Dad headed off to the house and instructed me to “Keep digging until I get back”.

Lucky for me this hole went a bit different than the first four. About the moment he got to the door of the house I busted through the clay layer into much sandier soil where I could get a couple inches of soil in one scoop rather than perhaps a quarter inch per scoop.

Easy peasy!

Now, I was a good kid. I didn’t cause trouble of any significant variety, I got good grades, and I helped out around the house when I got caught unawares. But seizing an opportunity for malicious compliance was definitely among my personal strengths.

Keep on going!

So I kept digging. And digging. Post-holer in, squeeze, post-holer out, dump, repeat.

Dad wasn’t on that phone call very long, but I made good time and by the time I saw him at the door coming back, I was quite literally putting the post-holer all the way into the ground to the point where the tips of the handles were just below the surface of the ground, and I couldn’t really dig because I couldn’t open up the handles to squeeze the digging end any longer.

So, if I had to guess, I’d say that hole was about five feet deep.

Dad: “How’s it going?”
Me: “I think it’s deep enough now.”
Dad: “Let’s put the post in and check.”
Me: (Huge grin while he stoops over to pick up the post).

Hey o!

Dad proceeds to drop the post in the hole. All the way in the hole. See, these posts were maybe hip height when installed, probably about five feet long themselves.

So there’s Dad, momentarily struck speechless, amazement washing across his face. He looks at me.

Me: “You told me to keep digging until you got back.” (shrugs)
Dad: “You little ****!” (laughs)

Dad had to grab the post with his fingertips and pull it back out of hole, and it wasn’t but a few seconds of work to refill the hole to the proper depth. And to this day he loves telling the story of his maliciously compliant son.”

Reddit users shared their thoughts.

This person got a kick out of this.

Another reader was impressed.

This Reddit uses offered some advice.

Another person spoke up.

And this individual weighed in.

This youngster showed his dad what malicious compliance is all about.

If you liked that story, read this one about grandparents who set up a college fund for their grandkid because his parents won’t, but then his parents want to use the money to cover sibling’s medical expenses.