This is the good stuff, baby!

We know you love a good story about stickin’ it to The Man, and this story from Reddit’s “Malicious Compliance” page is oh-so-satisfying!

Check out what happened!

Don’t want to hire me….okay, then. I’ll let you think that over.”

“To understand the setting, you need to know what a “crossdocker” is. That’s a logistics company that ships LTL loads, (less that trailer).

So let’s say that you have Customer, that has 2 skids for City A, 3 skids for City B, and a skid for City C.

You go to the customer, pick up all of his shipments, then put them in with the other orders for their respective cities. The freight moves “across the dock” into its destination container.

With this arrangement, you spend the day running around, picking up orders. Late in the afternoon, the loads start to arrive at the warehouse, and the fun begins. The dock crew worked 4 pm to midnight…sometimes later, depending on volume.

Let’s call my friend “Charlie”. He was a temp in the Dispatch office. When he was hired, it was staffed by Old Manager, Manager’s Nephew, and a Day Dispatcher who set up the pickups. That was the day shift. Charlie was the afternoon shift, along with two Data Entry clerks.

This is supposed to run like clockwork.

So the dock would load a container destined for a particular city. They hand the folder with the waybills for each of the shipments in the container to Data Entry, who get it into the server, and generate a manifest.

Most of these containers were intermodal, and they were shipped out by train. You’ve seen ships with containers piled on them? Same thing, except for domestic shipments they would use 53 foot containers, rather than the 40 foot containers you see on boats.

Charlie would take the folder, and then:

Verify that everything in the container was headed for the correct city.

Check for temperature controlled freight.

Check for Dangerous Goods, and make certain the container was placarded correctly.

Then he would go online, and check the container into the railway’s system.

When Charlie was hired, they were doing about 5-10 rail shipments a shift. He was told to copy-and-paste the information from the railway’s webpage into a report, then send a heads-up email at the conclusion of the shift to each of the partner terminals in the respective destination cities.

They were extremely busy.

By the time he’d been there 2.5 years, that volume had increased to about 40-50 loads a shift. Day shift might handle 3 or 4, and Manager and Nephew would use the copy-and-paste routine, but Charlie didn’t have the time to do that.

His brother was a bit of a techie, so when Charlie noticed that he could “export to Excel” a report from the rail yard site, he got his brother to write a script that would harvest the relevant info and generate reports for each of the cities, and would do it in a few seconds.

Charlie approached Manager and asked for a position with the company, as it would be a raise, and he would get health benefits. Manager dragged his feet, and finally said “no”.

Charlie needed to take a little break.

Charlie thought about it for a bit, then told Manager, “I’m going to be taking two weeks off, starting Monday. Call the Agency and get them to send someone else over.”

Manager was furious, but he didn’t have a leg to stand on. He wasn’t Charlie’s employer, so he had no authority to deny Charlie the time off. Charlie was in good with the Agency, one of their stars. Temp workers aren’t the most reliable….so anyone who kept his head down and caused no issues was valued, and the Agency backed him up.

Charlie had friends on the dock…and they kept him informed.

Things didn’t go well…

The first problem was that the replacement the Agency sent had nothing in the way of experience, and Manager had to train him from the ground up. This resulted in many phone calls throughout the evening to Manager….which got him more and more cranky as the days went on.

The second was the reports. This company was on the West Coast, and was shipping across the country. Each destination location had a huddle scheduled at 7 am in their respective time zones, where they would review the incoming shipments.

The dock would shut down sometimes at 1 am, and the new temp needed to get the reports out by 3 or 4 am, and the copy-and-paste routine was taking WAY too long.

Which bring us to the third problem….overtime.

The temp was running 12 to 14 hour shifts.

Manager delegated their nephew to work afternoons to help out. That meant Manager had to cover Nephew’s workload as well as his own. Nephew was really not happy either, as he was a sports fanatic, and played hockey several times a week. He had to miss his games.

In fact, in was downright ugly!

Even with Nephew on the job, the reports took forever to get out, and there were mistakes made. Temp controlled freight was sent dry, and in one case they had to send the dock foreman racing to the rail yard to placard a container before the yard would accept it.

After a week or so, Charlie took the opportunity to distribute his resume, and put Manager up as a reference.

So now Manager was getting calls about Charlie, and realized that Charlie might not come back. He was taking flamethrower heat from all directions, and his only way out was to put Charlie on the payroll.

By this time, the Agency had sent TWO temps to cover what Charlie used to do, with the oversight of Nephew.

Manager called Charlie in for an interview.

“Okay, Charlie, we’ll put you on the payroll, we’ll pay you the same as the Agency paid you, and we’ll give you benefits.”

Nah!

“No, thanks. I have other interested companies that are offering more.”

“Fine. We’ll put you on salary, and bump it up by 10%.”

“Again, no thanks. I won’t accept a salaried position unless I get to go home after 40 hours. If you need me to stay late, you need to pay me overtime.”

“How much an hour are you looking for?”

“Well, I know what you pay the Agency for my services, and right now you have two temps working to cover the shift. Tell you what, pay me what you were paying the Agency, and add the benefits, and you have a deal.”

“What? That’s almost double what you were making before.”

“….and that’s what other companies are offering. You can cut what you’re paying out to the agency by half, and there won’t be as many screw ups. Nephew can strap on his skates, and you can watch TV all evening without getting phone calls. Or things can continue the way they’re going. What’s it gonna be?”

Good work!

Charlie got hired on, made a good chunk more money, and as a sweetener, negotiated 3 weeks holidays a year.”

Check out what folks had to say about this on Reddit.

This person shared their thoughts.

Another individual spoke up.

This Reddit user weighed in.

And this individual shared their thoughts.

As the saying goes, you don’t know what you got until it’s gone…

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.