Efficiency in the workplace only works when ego stays out of it.

So when a veteran employee’s access to crucial reports was revoked by a territorial manager who insisted everything go through her team, he complied exactly as instructed.

But when her inbox with flooded with emails and important projects started getting dropped, an HR investigation revealed this manager wasn’t as honest as she seemed.

Keep reading for the full story.

Of course I’ll email your team

Many years back, I was working in an office for a company in one of their satellite sites.

In general, for your day-to-day, you only needed to use one system, as it did everything that you technically needed.

But it didn’t do everything you actually needed.

This employee had been around for quite a while, which was a big advantage.

Now, I was an older employee and was there before the new shiny bespoke software got rolled out.

Which meant I had login details for the old system, which was still the backbone of half of our head office work and fed into what we saw.

He ended up having more insight than the people actually in charge.

This was really useful, as it meant I could log in and access loads of information that we actually needed.

Information that some faceless exec had decided to exclude from the new system.

So for the next three or four years, I would log in every couple of days and download a report or two.

This was doing the company a huge favor.

Giving us buying reports, stocking issues, and more, that I could then share with the rest of our site.

It wasn’t confidential information, and while we could do without it, it definitely made life easier having it.

We’d never had an issue and no one had complained.

But soon that all changed.

Until one day, one of the department managers found out I was downloading reports from a system that she was adamant only her team needed to use.

She contacted IT and had them revoke my access.

Annoyingly, she did so without letting me know.

This plunged the employee into total confusion.

Which meant when I logged in the next time, well, I didn’t and just got an error message.

Locally, we had no idea what had happened.

So a quick email to IT and we got told that Karen had had my access blocked.

Then it’s a quick email to Karen to find out why.

Karen wasn’t sympathetic at all.

All I got was a short and curt, “You don’t need access. If you need to know something, you ask my team.”

I figure there are two reasons for this.

One being she’s a power-hungry pain in the *** that likes to control people.

She also had another ulterior motive.

And two is she’d been trying to expand her team.

I guess if you make 20 satellite stores run through her, then you create the workload you need to take on two or three more people so you can give your best friend flexible working hours.

Allegedly.

There was also another reason.

She really hated me after I called her out once and humiliated her in front of the company directors.

She lodged a complaint to HR demanding I be fired.

Only for the CEO to tell them to withdraw it, as I hadn’t done anything wrong after I named him as a witness to the event.

So the employee decided they were ready to fight back.

So, malicious compliance time.

Those reports I downloaded, granted it was only two or three reports and only two or three times a week.

Which doesn’t seem like a big amount.

But those reports helped resolve 50-plus complaints and enquiries per day.

He decided Karen should get in on some of the fun.

So now, I guess we have to email her team each time.

I told the rest of my team to run every query through me, and I would email her team.

One, because I didn’t want anyone else to get in trouble, as I knew this was going to make her explode.

Two, because I could field the queries to make sure each one was unique, as we did get duplicate info requests.

If they’ve told me once, I didn’t want to upset them by making them tell me twice.

And thirdly, because I’m a ****, I wanted her to know it was me.

It didn’t take long for Karen to crack under pressure.

She managed a week.

By day three, she had contacted my manager to complain.

By day five, because I hadn’t stopped and we still needed questions answered, she had a meeting with HR.

I got a “cease and desist” request, asking if I could send a single email at the end of each day with all the queries in.

Her overloaded inbox was leading to a lot of missed work.

It turns out, if you email six people up to 50 emails a day, at some point someone misses an important invoice and a whole shipment gets delayed.

Or worse, gets cancelled.

But finally, Karen started to see some consequences.

The upside.

Within a couple of months, her team was “restructured,” with different members being given regional coverage.

Karen had been severely misrepresenting the work her team did.

Turns out, the reason her team looked so busy is because they would count one job done by one person as being six jobs.

One for each person because they were all included in the same emails.

Turns out you don’t need a bigger team if you’re honest about the work they do.

But with this employee’s help, things were a lot more efficient.

And secondly, the reports I downloaded, each person in her team now has to download them themselves twice a week and send them out to the stores in their region.

The other stores had just decided that now they couldn’t find out, there was no reason to know.

And answered queries with “I don’t know” for years.

So we accidentally made their services better too.

Take that, Karen!

Redditors chime in with their thoughts.

If it was this commenter, they would have said something like this.

This user is reminded of someone they work with.

There could be another big reason Karen wanted to hide this data.

She wanted total control, she he gave her total compliance.

So when HR came knocking, the truth finally came out.

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.