New managers always seem to have the tendency of thinking they know better than far-more-established staff.

What would you do if your manager cut your hours, but still expected the same quality of work? One man recently shared a delicious example of malicious compliance that dealt with exactly this.

Here’s what went down.

No overtime, no problem

I work maintenance for a fast food restaurant, and when I started I had a verbal agreement with the GM that she would retroactively approve all my overtime.

We were only allowed to have 2 maintenance people, and 1 of them was the owners son who didn’t do his job, so we couldn’t fire him.

So they effectively had one maintenance person.

Things were fine the entire time she worked there, and our store often scored the best of all the chains during inspections.

Eventually that GM quit, and on day 1 her replacement told me she would no longer approve my overtime.

No one wants a GM who doesn’t support their staff.

I had her send that to me in writing, and from then on as soon as I hit 40 hours I would stop showing up for the week and turn off the work phone.

This often happened 3-4 days into the week.

Not surprising.

Now, our store was opened 70 years ago so things break often.

The first week the walk-in broke but I was already at 40 hours so I didn’t know until 3 days later.

We had to waste all our frozen product, and the next week the fryers stopped heating so we couldn’t make most of the stuff on the menu.

Nothing’s a problem until it inconveniences the wrong people.

Then, we had a surprise health inspection and the store got red tagged.

That was the final straw, the owner was going to fire me, but after he talked to the old GM and I showed him the email from the new GM, he fired her and my original agreement with the old GM is now part of the terms of my employment.

You can never get promoted past having to learn things the hard way. Let’s see what Reddit had to say about this one.

Many lamented the truth behind the “new manager” stereotype.

Others could relate to the original poster.

Another person brought up the uselessness of the other staff.

Some people left some sage advice.

And one person even encouraged the poster to dream bigger!

If you can’t pay to fix the heat, get out of the kitchen!

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.