What happened to lending a helping hand to your co-workers?

Well, judging by the story you’re about to read, some bosses aren’t too keen on the idea.

Check out what they had to say below and see what you think.

I Can Only Do My Work? Okay!

“I used to work for a famous place that dispenses medications (I’m sure many of you have seen one) for more serious, chronic conditions.

Medications were delivered to patients instead of picked up; that’s really the only thing you need to know.

I worked in the insurance authorization portion (for non-Americans, that basically means I was responsible for trying to get the insurance coverages to actually pay for the medications many of these people needed to live their lives. Yes, it’s stupid and inefficient).

If anyone is familiar with insurance work, you know it’s (1) basically thankless, (2) usually involves having to be on the phone a lot, and (3) is ALWAYS behind. Number 3 is the important part.

They had some issues at work…

Supervisors at the job didn’t like me much because I questioned a lot of stuff and tried to make things more efficient.

However, because of their own set of rules and metrics, they couldn’t really ding me on a lot of stuff, because I always performed well in performance reviews (perhaps that is also a form of malicious compliance?).

Now, to the part where the malicious compliance comes in.

My supervisors and I weren’t exactly pals (a story for another time), but many of my coworkers absolutely loved me, and whenever I could help out with their workloads, I would.

For most of my time there, I did my own work, helped out two other coworkers (with their blessing), helped out other coworkers when they complained about being overwhelmed, and managed to keep fully abreast on all the work.

One day, though, Supervisor A came to me and said, “hey, you need to focus on your own work.”

“What do you mean, Supervisor A? I’m completely caught up and waiting on a lot of responses–”

“You need to stop helping your coworkers out. They’ve got their work assigned, you’ve got yours. Just focus on what you’ve got.”

If you say so!

Okay, Supervisor A. You want me to focus on my own stuff? You got it.

I warned the coworkers I was helping that Supervisor A was telling me not to help them anymore, transferred all the work I’d helped with back to the original owners, and…spent time working on writing things down with pen and paper.

Not two days later, Supervisor A, and her counterpart, Supervisor B, came in and were questioning my coworkers about why their workloads were suddenly so much larger.

Several of them apparently gave the same answer: “They were helping keep our queues lowered.”

A day after that, we went into mandatory overtime because “things had gotten too busy for regular hours.”

Both supervisors walked by my desk several times (open-floor desk plans are the WORST), but since I was demurely either writing something down by hand, or had my own work-queue conspicuously open to where they could indeed see I was fully caught up with everything typically assigned to me, they were not able to say a single word.

I’m so glad I’m out of that job now.

Bonus is that the job paid me for several hours of work where I was actually writing down story ideas, grocery lists, to-do lists, and getting my resume in order.”

And this is how readers reacted on Reddit.

This person can relate.

Another individual weighed in.

This Reddit user shared their thoughts.

Another reader spoke up.

And this individual chimed in.

This worker’s supervisors definitely don’t sound too bright!

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.