Imagine working for free. That’s what most interns do, and it can be really hard work. If you thought your new boss didn’t have his priorities straight, would you follow his orders anyway or show him how unreasonable his demands were?

In this story, a group of interns are in this exact situation, and they teach the new assistant manager a lesson.

Let’s see how the story plays out.

Unload all trucks!

In the late 90s I did a voluntary (and unpaid) internship in a sound and light rental company to increase my chances to get accepted for a professional training in light and sound engineering.

I was assigned to their main warehouse to get to know all the equipment. There were a couple of other interns and in fact the company heavily relied on them as cheap workforce and truck hands.

The head warehouse manager was surprisingly kind to us.

First of all, he knew that his job would be much more tedious without us interns, and secondly, he was fully aware that we came there unpaid, and he gave us enough space to experiment and often enough taught us how to operate and maintain even the most expensive equipment like lighting consoles and moving lights.

The job wasn’t easy, but OP had a positive way of looking at the various tasks.

However most of the time we were busy moving around massive speakers, lights and rigging equipment which is all *really* heavy.

It was mostly loading and unloading trucks and cleaning stuff that came back from open air shows and sorting it back to where it belonged.

Cleaning a few kilometers of power cables or 500 shackles can be a very meditative and relaxing thing to do when the alternative is to push a few dozen 120kg flight cases and speaker stacks into a truck…

On the plus side, eight weeks of moving heavy things around is excellent physical workout, and after a couple of weeks we got really quick at doing the unpleasant part of the job, getting back to thoroughly testing sound effects, fog machines and moving lights for things not specifically mentioned in the manual.

The new assistant manager made some changes.

As the company grew rapidly, they hired an assistant warehouse manager who had spent the last eight years in the military, and the head warehouse manager was able to make himself scarce.

It took only two weeks for the new assistant to start ordering us around, and he went to great lengths to minimize our “learning time.”

One of his first “orders” was to stop whatever we were doing immediately when a truck arrived and unload it as quickly as possible, while making sure to stay in the office container as long as possible to print “the papers” and chat with customers.

They were pretty busy when the assistant manager interrupted their work.

One Friday afternoon, we interns were busy in an adjacent warehouse putting up a new heavy-duty high rack. It was located in a wing of the facility from which we could not see the loading dock, and it took at least four of us to move even one of those 20-foot-high uprights.

The moment we had already aligned one 75 degrees, the assistant manager stormed in angrily and yelled at us that yet another customer truck needed to be unloaded, adding, “I told you to unload ALL trucks arriving at the loading dock as soon as they arrive!”

Dropping the nearly upright stand caused a satisfying clang, and all five of us reluctantly went to the loading dock only to open a 7.5-ton truck with a hydraulic ramp loaded with two flight cases on wheels that the assistant could have easily moved himself….

I will never forget the evil grin on the face of one of the other interns as we walked back into the high rack construction hall.

They knew what to expect from their regular customers.

After two months working there we already knew the regular customers, especially this one hectic customer who would show up almost every Friday around noon to pick up a truck load of equipment for privately organized parties.

In most of his visits he would forget something which was not on the list already and then return late in the afternoon to pick it up.

And this day it was none of us who had loaded his truck. So we went back to the high rack construction and let the high-school student intern watch the loading bay for a late Friday afternoon truck to arrive.

Hectic customer returned at 17:50, 10 minutes before Feierabend.

They had the perfect opportunity to maliciously comply with the assistant manager’s orders.

Picking up stuff not ordered beforehand was not storage business but required hectic customer to go upstairs to the rental processing floor where the *good* coffee machine was.

Assistant manager unsuspectingly joined him. This would easily take 15 minutes. Good for us!

In a glorious act of teamwork we managed to unload the almost fully loaded 7.5t truck in under 10 minutes and sorted mostly everything back to where it had to be. The remaining time was spent to write a note to put on the back of the truck saying “Assistant manager told us to unload all trucks. You’re welcome. Have a good weekend!”.

And then we ran.

It all worked out pretty well.

The next Monday we were all prepared for trouble but instead head storage manager greeted us with the biggest smile we had seen on him and presented us the note from the truck.

Assistant manager admitted his “order” and had been there with hectic customer until 21:00 to re-pack and load everything.

After pretending to be angry at us for a while he turned out to be a really nice guy, and told us that he would have done the same in his early military days.

Hectic customer became a friend and mentor and soon took us to his productions. He had his revenge on some of us a few years later when he didn’t show up to unload a trailer after a 28h open air production (Some of us were freelance light technicians and riggers by then).

That’s awesome that the interns didn’t suffer any negative consequences for their act of malicious compliance and that the assistant manager admitted that he had told them to unload all trucks immediately.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

In case you’re wondering, it’s a celebratory word that basically means “quitting time” in German.

This person seems to know their stuff.

It really is a good malicious compliance story.

This is very true!

There are always exceptions to the rule.

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.