Micromanagers love control until it starts working against them.

So when one employee’s general manager insisted on seeing every conversation they had with their colleagues, they decided to overload her with mountains of meaningless messages.

And when the boss inevitably couldn’t keep up, she couldn’t help but rethink her ill-advised directions.

Keep reading for the full story.

You want all my correspondence?

I had a narcissist GM. I was in a senior role in a small company. The GM hounded staff and expected me to join in, while I did my best to protect them.

After huge staff turnover, it was my turn to be the target.

They explain their primary responsibilities.

One of my tasks was to liaise with our agents in China. We had a multitude of manufacturing projects underway, from initial design to shipping.

I’d communicate with the agents via WeChat, which is similar to WhatsApp. Because I’d been working with the agents for a while, when we were talking about projects, there would be side chats about the weather or holidays or family.

Then their boss started getting way too controlling.

Now that I was under the microscope, the GM demanded I share all my communication with her. I have no idea why, but I did exactly what she said.

I took a screenshot of each message sent or received separately and sent it to her via Slack.

So the employee complied…maliciously.

Our conversations were not very exciting, but I made sure to send her each and every message.

A simple conversation like the following would be 10 separate Slack messages. I made sure to get the name and timestamp so she could see exactly what I was doing.

The manager had a lot to sift through.

Hello / Hello, how are you / I’m good, how are you going? / Great! Things are busy / Oh, here too! / I’m looking forward to the weekend / Do you have plans? / Nope / Just relaxing? / Yes ✋🏼

Obviously, relationships are important in business, so I made sure I was extra chatty, and in the interests of efficiency kept the messages as short as possible.

The first day, I’d sent her several hundred messages on Slack within a couple of hours. I even sent her “haha” and emojis.

Finally, her boss just gave up.

The next day, she told me she didn’t need to see all my correspondence after all.

Micromanaging doesn’t automatically make you a good leader.

What did Reddit think?

Their boss can’t read their messages if she can’t understand them.

There’s some ethical implications here too.

The boss clearly underestimated just how exhausting reading all the messages would be.

This manager ultimately couldn’t even handle one day of sorting through all of this.

Her power trip appeared to crash under the weight of her own unreasonable demands.

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