If you want things to change in your work environment, you gotta take action, people!

And this story is a perfect example of what I’m talking about.

Check out how these ambulance drivers did things their way to prove a point to the bigwigs at their company.

Want ambulances to travel faster than the speed of light? No.

“It’s been many years since I worked for the company this relates to.

Being a private ambulance company, they acquired the contract to provide transport for patients to the hospital when they call 911. The city/county pays a flat rate in the contract to make sure that an ambulance responds and arrives on scene within 8 minutes and 59 seconds from the time of dispatch.

On top of that, our company was allowed to bill the patients insurance for the transportation and cost of treatment. Given our location, that is a pretty reasonable criteria.

Per the contract, we were allowed to have 10% of our response times to be what was called “Late Response” meaning we arrived on scene 9 minutes or later. This on-time vs late ratio was what we called compliance. 98% compliance, we’re golden. 89% compliance… emails started going out and phones started ringing.

There were strict rules about this stuff.

The thing is, we had to maintain DAILY compliance. We could have ZERO compliance from midnight to 3 am, but as long as the compliance picked up and we met 90% or greater by midnight the end of the day, we were considered compliant.

BUT here’s the real kicker.

Our management was the ONLY entity responsible for reporting compliance to the county. And that means numbers were scrubbed and fudged upside-down, left and right. They used special “delays” or exemptions that would drop the response times from the reports and consider them “outliers”.

Generally used for if an ambulance is delayed by a train crossing, construction, severe weather conditions… etc. But management abused these delays in their reports to maintain compliance.

Now, being responsible for the safety and care of critically sick or injured people you’d think that they would adequately staff the ambulances to handle the population of our service area and throw a little extra staff on top just to be safe and make sure they could handle anything that happens, right?

Wow, this is sketchy.

Haha. No.

They’re trying to make money. If they can maintain compliance with less people, they did it. Hell, even if they couldn’t make compliance, they’d use the delay exemptions to make it look like they were compliant. But, it’s not like anyone was auditing them anyways.

We were simply understaffed. We constantly ran at what’s called “Level Zero” in which the level refers to the number of ambulances available to respond to calls.

If corporate had their way, if you could run a Level Zero constantly and still make compliance, we would be operating at peak efficiency, and the shareholders were happy.

Really sketchy!

We were pressured to unsafely blow through stop signs and red lights, drive faster than reasonably necessary. Hell even our supervisor taught us the trick of using the cruise control to bypass the speed limiter on our trucks.

We were tired, overworked and spent more time driving in high-stress environments than the DOT would ever even let truck drivers get close to. We complained to the union, we tried whistleblowing to the county, but nothing changed. We’d had it.

The contract renewal was coming up. We had to be perfect with response times and look good so we could secure the next 4 years of service. But we all agreed. Enough was enough.

The workers decided to fight back.

We started following the laws regarding code 3 driving (lights and sirens) we stopped at every stop sign or red light, we drove no faster than we deemed safe for conditions. We sand bagged the ever living HELL out of our response times and drove compliance straight into the ground.

Unless the response was absolutely critical, every belly-ache and stubbed toe (which was 90% of our calls) we took our reasonable sweet time getting there. The exemptions couldn’t even mask the failure of our compliance.

Two weeks in and many many meetings with supervision, they couldn’t write us up for being safer and they started to staff more ambulances to regain compliance in time for the end of the month.

It lasted a while, but I sought out employment elsewhere and haven’t looked back since. I miss the job, but not the company.”

Reddit users shared their thoughts.

This person had a lot to say.

Another Reddit user shared their thoughts.

This individual didn’t hold back.

Another person spoke up.

And this reader chimed in.

Malicious compliance can be very handy when it comes to changing your work environment.

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.