Imagine going out of your way to make sure your workplace runs smoothly and even going to work early to achieve this goal, but your boss doesn’t know and thinks you’re actually slacking off.

Would you explain the situation to the boss, or would you stop coming in early so your boss can see the consequences?

In this story, one employee chooses the second option.

Let’s see how the story plays out.

You can’t read your newspaper in work time.. My best ever ‘malicious compliance’

Years ago I was the Systems Supervisor at a University based group.

It was a joint group with the Administration Board and budget coming from University Libraries around England and Wales.

It was a cutting edge Network to each of the Universities Libraries, did their book dispensing and receipt and also did the cataloguing, which is quite complex.

The Catalogue entry processing and various other batch processes ran automatically overnight and the System had to be up and running for 8am when the libraries opened their doors.

But there were some things that had to happen first.

Before that could happen the printouts from the overnight runs needed to be taken off the printer and the stack of line print paper Logs had to be gone through to ensure no failures occurred.

Only then could the Computer be rebooted into online mode for the libraries.

Checking the stack of line printed logs took about an hour.

So my practise was to arrive an hour early for work, go through the printouts , then I would restart the Computer and while that process was going on would get a cup of coffee and sit down to read the news headlines and drink my coffee, maybe a 10 minute break time.

The boss didn’t understand.

Enter my boss, who, for a University educated manager of a university group, had the personality of a mid-19th Century mill owner. Rude, arrogant and entitled were just a few words to describe him.

We has clashed a few times previous to this but this was a real kicker.

He came in and saw me reading a newspaper and drinking coffee at 8:05am and , not letting me explain, he gave me a ‘good talking to’ and told me he didn’t expect to see me doing this again.

Let’s see what happens when she doesn’t arrive early.

Next day I came to work at 8am on the dot. Then got the printout pile and started working through it, normal pace, no need to dawdle, the Libraries were already getting frustrated before I even started the checking process.

But they didn’t call us, they called him at home.

He rushes in at 8:30 demanding to know why the Computer wasn’t up and available for the libraries yet.

I told him, because the overnight logs need to be checked for failures first and that takes almost an hour.

The boss had no idea what changed.

He said “We have been running on this machine for a year, why has this not been a problem before? ”

I looked deadpan at him and replied “Because until yesterday I had been giving the group an unpaid hour of my time to enable the Computer to be available to the libraries at 8am. As my efforts were not only ignored but treated with such anger yesterday, I have started working to rule on this now. The Computer will never be restarted to Online mode until these printouts are checked and that will not start till 8am”

He said I can come in early myself and check them.

I said not if you don’t want a country-wide University workers strike you won’t – Unions can be useful in some circumstances.

It worked out well for everyone except the boss.

Standoff for the next two days, followed by the deputy coming in to see me and asking me to a meeting with a group-board member (an aged professor) who had come to get this fixed.

Boss went away, Deputy, a much better person, got promoted, I got a promotion + pay rise and asked to change my start time to 7am.

Problem solved and everybody was happy, including the board who had had their own problems with the now ex boss and were pleased that I had given them chance to remove him.

Instead of coming in an hour early for free, she should’ve told that boss about the situation earlier.

Starting at 7am really is the perfect solution.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

If the boss hadn’t been so quick to jump to assumptions, it would’ve ended differently.

This person’s coworker couldn’t even enjoy his lunch break.

Another person shares what they would’ve done differently.

Here’s some praise for unions.

Seriously, nobody should be working for free.

That ended well, but not for the boss!

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.