When you work for a large company, you can count on the fact that some people will be actively working against your success.

What would you do if your new manager started demanding that you change the way you do certain things, and the way she wanted it was clearly incorrect?

That is what happened to the writer in this story, so when it got to the point that he had to comply, he made sure to document all the demands that the manager was making. This way, when he inevitably got fired, he could show HR that he was just doing as he was told.

The manager didn’t seem to understand why he was insisting on all of this documentation, and that really worked against her.

Keep reading to see how the story plays out.

Manager gets me fired; doesn’t realize there’s a paper trail

I worked as a writer and editor for over a decade, and in that time I had my fair share of bad bosses—like anyone.

But there is one that completely takes the cake.

I worked for a large media company that had dealings with a number of other companies and subsidiaries ranging from publishing to fashion to sports to tech. You name it, they did it.

How our writing department worked was each writer would have specific areas that they would write for, kind of like how journalists have “beats” they cover.

This makes sense. It allows the writers to focus on their specialized area.

So if you were assigned to the fashion arm of the company or one of its partners/subsidiaries, you wrote or edited everything for that arm.

I worked for this company for about a year and a half before a new manager was hired. She was the second in command of our department.

Part of her and our department director’s job was to update our internal style guide when necessary.

For those that don’t know, a style guide is a reference document for how to either refer to things or how to format things for the company/partners.

Keeping a good style guide largely unchanged likely makes everyone’s jobs easier.

Before her tenure as manager, this was only done maybe once or twice a year, and the changes were relatively minimal since the style guide was very well established in the company and had been in place for a number of years.

After she came on, it was being updated at least once a week, if not multiple times a week. It legitimately became an obsession for her.

Aside from the general annoyance of keeping up with it, it didn’t take long for me and my coworkers to reach the conclusion that our new manager didn’t have the faintest idea what she was doing.

Each new version had more and more glaring errors.

Every new employee deserves a chance to settle in and get their footing.

At first, we all ignored these changes, giving her the benefit of the doubt and hoping, albeit naively, that these new directives were mistakes.

That was until people started getting reprimanded for not following the style guide.

I was the first to get a one-on-one, closed door talk.

Well, when your boss makes a demand, you really do have to follow the orders.

One of the departments I wrote for was sports, and she had seen that I had not been following the new rule of how I was to refer to the men’s and women’s teams I covered.

Truthfully, I had willfully ignored it hoping that it was just a mistake. To my horror, however, it appeared my new writing manager didn’t understand basic grammar.

You see, the change she implemented removed the apostrophe from “men’s” and “women’s”. So, for example, if I was covering “men’s basketball”, I was to refer to it as “mens basketball”.

Her rationale was that the men didn’t own the team; therefore, it should not be possessive. Apparently, her understanding of the English language didn’t evolve past grade school explanations.

Not only does she not understand, but she actively wants to avoid learning from her mistakes.

I was honestly pretty dumbfounded at first. But once I got over the initial shock that the second in command of our department didn’t realize “mens” was not a word, I tried bleakly to explain that men is already plural and that a possessive “‘s” doesn’t always denote direct ownership (read: men’s bathroom).

She stared blankly at me for a few seconds, and for the briefest of moments, I thought maybe I was seeing the cogs in her head turn.

She however, doubled down.

Realizing the fight was lost, I told her that I would implement the changes going forward.

Major companies are not going to be happy with obvious mistakes like this. He is wise to protect himself like this.

Now, here’s where my malicious compliance comes in: We worked for, and with, some very high profile companies, and mistakes were not tolerated for things that were outward facing.

Realizing her idiocy could cost me my job, I made a simple request: Could you please email me the exact style guide rule you’re referencing and how exactly you’d like me to implement it, with examples of where I messed up?

She looked at me like I was stupid for not understanding what was being asked of me, but she still wrote it all down in an email for me.

I also made sure any further style changes were referenced in an email and specifically asked that if there were further changes to please cite how I had done them in the past, along with how she would like them to be done from now on.

Was he just fired on the spot without any type of corrective counseling?

Sure enough, within about 6 months of this, I was fired.

And at my exit interview, I handed HR a folder containing every written communication regarding the style changes, along with quite a bit of evidence that she was passing off her projects to other members of the dept and changing people’s work behind their back.

She was fired three months after me, along with our department director three months after that.

Turned out, my little folder sparked a full investigation by HR, and after interviewing other coworkers in the department, they realized she had done all of it to have grounds to fire people within the department she didn’t like.

Did she really think she was going to get away with it? That the employees wouldn’t expose what she was doing?

I just happened to be the first on the chopping block.

The projects she was passing off to other people? She was taking the credit for what they were doing to make herself look good.

Those changes she was making to other people’s work? HR realized that she was changing things to make it explicitly incorrect.

Modern software really can do a lot to track who is doing what work.

You gotta love software that tracks changes and timestamps and lists the user.

On top of all of this, they also discovered that she had, at best, exaggerated (and, at worst, fabricated) large swaths of her resume.

By the time she was fired, I had already found another job in a different department at the same company. It was a good gig, and my new manager wasn’t a complete jerk.

Eventually, I moved on from that company, but if anything, my time there taught me a very valuable lesson: document, document, and document some more.

The lesson he learned about documenting everything and keeping it around to cover yourself is very important. The sad reality is that there are always people at work who are more than happy to stab you in the back. Everyone wants to get ahead in the world, and they don’t care who they have to hurt to get there.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a man who refused to keep giving his coworker rides to work because he left a mess in his car.

Read on to see what the people in the comments have to say about this story.

It would be funny if this commenter had the same manager.

This commenter thinks he could sue her.

Incompetent managers are a hazard in the workplace.

Get proof of every command and keep it accessible. Most people have to learn this for themselves.

Print the emails and keep them at home if you can.

Always keep proof of your boss being stupid, it may save you someday. Unfortunately, the guy in this story still got fired, but at least he was able to take his terrible manager down with him.