If you quit your job to work at a different company and your old boss told you to wipe your computer before you left, would you do it without question, or would you point out that there might be some things the boss would want to backup first?

In this story, one woman is in this exact situation, and she tries to warn the boss that there are some important things on her computer.

Eventually, he has to learn the hard way!

Let’s see how the story plays out.

Wipe my computer? Sure thing! (you didn’t say anything about saving the important information on it first)

I thought I’d tell the story of malicious compliance committed many years ago by my friend (we’ll call her Samantha) who worked (and still works) as an accountant.

She wasn’t a manager or anything but she had been there for more than 5 years and basically knew so much about how the place ran that she really was a manager in all but title.

Samantha was told that she would be ‘stepping down’ to a lower position (and therefore lower pay) for “operational and restructuring reasons” but it was really so that the boss’s daughter could replace her.

This is really unfair.

The boss also told her that she would be responsible for training his daughter, who not only had no accounting qualifications, but had never even held so much as a fast food or retail job.

The boss estimated it would take “several months” to train her.

What went unsaid was the fact Samantha would inevitably be given the boot altogether as soon as her replacement was somewhat competent, so at this point she knew her days there were numbered.

Time to move on.

Samantha quite rightly said, “No, if she needs that much training, she’s not fit for the job.”

So the boss made life miserable for a few months until she had to quit for her own well-being (which worked out for the best as she had a new job in less than a fortnight).

The day she left, the boss stood over her with his daughter (claiming that she was the new “supervisor”, to add insult to injury) and demanded she wipe her company computer.

She was hesitant.

Still having some sense of morality (even though this boss didn’t deserve it) Samantha asked if he was sure and that he might want to take some backups from it first.

Before she could finish speaking he yelled over her to “Just get on with it and wipe it clean”.

She shrugged and did as she was told.

The boss forgot about something really important.

What the boss didn’t realise (or had forgotten) was Samantha had been instructed by him to create social media accounts/pages on various platforms for their accounting company’s branch several years earlier, but that because the boss was anal and paranoid and didn’t want them linked to any of their official company emails for some reason, he’d told her to set them up with her own email account and manage their social media promotion posts in her own name.

Not wanting to do that, she created a new email account through Outlook or whatever and used that instead to set up the accounts on Facebook, Instagram etc.

The boss eventually realized the mistake.

Boss called her in a panic about a week after Samantha had quit because his daughter had tried to access the Facebook account so they could post some advertising in the lead up to tax-time, but couldn’t even log in.

Samantha said she no longer had the details of the login credentials/passwords and couldn’t help him.

He said, “You must have written them down somewhere!”

She replied, “Yes, they were in a Notepad document on the desktop of my computer.”

The computer that had been wiped the day she left the company.

The boss got himself into that mess and has nobody to blame but himself.

That’s perfect malicious compliance.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This person loved the story.

Exactly!

Another person did something similar.

Some people don’t make the best decisions.

That was a big mistake!

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.