In today’s corporate world, the only thing going above and beyond gets you is more work and higher expectations.

So when one high-achieving employee who routinely crushed his daily quota had one sick day and fell one case short, his boss treated it like a crisis and shoved him into an HR workshop for underperformers.

And from that point on, the employee decided the company was getting exactly the quota — and not a single case more.

You’ll want to keep reading for this one.

Punishing me for underperforming for 1 day in 2 years? No problem.

I work at a company where I handle mid to high level complaints to managers, PR, and legal.

My daily requirement is 40 cases handled per day.

This high-achieving employee regularly exceeds this.

There are some of my team colleagues that struggle with this, but I don’t, and I don’t feel lazy to stop at 40, so I have handled 50-55 basically every day for the past two years.

There is no bonus (or even recognition) for this.

I just did it because I felt a friendly obligation to the company.

Complaints can be a 5 minute resolution, or a 2 hour Zoom call with our New York lawyers.

It’s a gamble, really.

But soon, a bout of illness knocked him off his game.

Recently I had a day where I felt a bit sick and, at the same time, had bad luck of getting only very hard cases that required more time, so I had 39 cases (1 under the requirement).

I thought nothing of it, as my weekly average was off the charts, 50+ as usual.

The very next day I felt better and went back to my usual high numbers.

But his boss wasn’t so forgiving.

Come Monday, I had an “emergency 1-on-1” with my manager where I was informed that I had to attend a 3 day workshop/seminar on how to best meet requirements, because I “underperformed last week.”

My jaw dropped, and I asked don’t they count the weekly, monthly, yearly numbers, to which I was told that the “daily requirement is 40, and this is standard practice, nothing we can do.”

This HR workshop wasn’t meant for employees like him.

Basically it was a workshop for underperformers who had 20-30 out of 40 cases daily.

It was nothing hard, but I did need to drive there for 3 days after work and listen to HR guys giving bad advice (as they never actually handled the cases in real life).

And I had to talk about what will I do to improve my numbers and “reach the 40,” as they nonsense HR talk calls it.

This made me lose hours and hours of my free time, and I was livid.

So this employee decided he was going to fight back against this injustice.

After it was over, I had a long think, and I decided that I will do exactly that.

I will “reach the 40” and that’s it.

For the past few months, I go into work, I handle 40 cases, my daily requirement, and then I do NOTHING for the rest of my shift.

The manager definitely took notice.

I have had multiple 1-on-1’s with my manager during this time, and I am constantly asked: “is something wrong,” to which I naively reply “no, am in trouble, am I underperforming?”

And then of course they say that I am 100% within daily requirements, and that way I shut the conversation down.

This is real life, so I can’t really say a clever comeback or something like that, but I do keep “playing the fool” that has no idea what is wrong now.

The employee can’t help but laugh at how badly the manager has messed this whole thing up.

But I find satisfaction in knowing that they got used to my overachieving and are now suffering for the lack of it.

Before Easter, they put up an internal ad for promoting another 2 managers.

So my guess is how that is the number of people they will now need to pay extra, just because they lost me as an overachiever.

And they lost me for no reason other than their own stupidity.

Sounds like this manager should have just kept their mouth shut.

What did Reddit think?

Many firings aren’t influenced by common sense at all.

Many bosses accuse their employees of being “underperforming” without any real understanding of what that actually means.

Is strict quotas even the best way to run a business in the first place?

This user thinks of a comeback that’s both snappy and workplace appropriate.

Management got strict compliance, and the top performer stopped donating free labor.

Play silly games, win silly prizes!

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.