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Job descriptions become powerful when management uses them selectively.

One director reassigned a trusted truck driver and pointed to his contract.

The driver accepted those exact terms.

Winter soon tested that decision.

Let’s see how this one played out.

Director pulls the contract on the truck-driver, and quickly regrets it.

“This malicious compliance wasn’t done by me, but by a colleague at my old work.

At my old workplace, we had a truck-driver, we’ll call him Jim. Our director had decided to cut down on the amount of manpower in the production unit, to try and squeeze some more money out of it.

One of the people laid off was a storage worker, and the director then wanted Jim to take over on storage, and make the big truck more of a “Whoever needs it, uses it” kinda thing, as opposed to having one man who mans it, for the majority of the time.

Though driving the truck only took about half of Jim’s day and the rest of the time he did all kinds of other things around the company that needed doing (Maintenance, cleaning the yard, cutting the grass, etc.)

They tried to tell the director…

Now my boss, had made a fair fuss about this, during the meetings where this was decided, since Jim, being on that truck, was a very good thing for the company, but alas, the director didn’t wanna listen.

They then had a meeting where Jim and the three people who were the likely candidates for using the truck were informed of this change (the storage worker had been fired the same day).

Now, nobody was really happy about this. One of the practical problems is that when you have multiple people using a tool, whether it by a hammer, a power drill, or a truck, it becomes a mess to coordinate, who needs it when, who handles what in regards to maintenance, and so on, and so on.

This was going to be a mess.

But none were more unhappy than Jim, and he quite openly said that storage work wasn’t his job. To which the director made one of many big mistakes in this whole streamlining process he was doing to the production unit.

He pulled out the contract, that had a highlighted “Work in the production” bit.

So what kind of malicious compliance does a former truck driver get up to?

Well, glad you asked.

Jim wasn’t playing around.

Very simply, he stopped doing anything that wasn’t related to production. Examples of minor things Jim stopped doing: Buying basic groceries for the production office (Milk, sugar etc.).

He stopped bringing breakfast to the production workers (Jim drove to a local sandwich maker, and picked up breakfast, and lunch, for most in the production) meaning that now everybody went there on their own, creating massive amounts of delay in every department-maintaining order in the yard, so everything stored out there was easy to find, and traffic could go through easily.

But, the very best thing he stopped was clearing away snow.

You see, one of the many things Jim did was if there was a forecast for snow, he’d set an alarm at 4:00, only to look out the window, and if he needed to clear snow, he’d just go to work, and make sure the snow was cleared, and the roads salted for when everybody else arrived. He also stopped that.

That was a problem!

And, this particular year, winter hit us pretty suddenly, so there was quite a bit of snow, and ice all over the place, including the main office buildings parking lot.

Now Jim, being the absolute champ that he was, had made sure that the production unit had been cleared, but left the main office building (on the other side of the road) to fend for itself.

And since we in the production meet earlier than the office people did, we could stand there and watch.

As they started arriving, and half their parking spots had so much snow in them, that they were unusable, and how their cars just skipped around on the ice under the snow.

It….was….glorious.

3 cars were lightly damaged, and one took a pretty hefty hit, as he clipped the corner of the concrete building. and no less than 9 people fell on the ice, including, the director himself.

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Which resulted in about 45 production workers, standing inside our machine hall, almost ******* themselves laughing.”

Here’s what folks had to say about this on Reddit.

This person spoke up.

Another individual quoted some song lyrics by Jim Croce.

This reader shared their thoughts.

Another Reddit user weighed in.

And this individual spoke up.

After being forced into production work, the driver stopped handling errands, yard organization, meals, and snow removal outside that department.

When winter arrived, production remained clear while office workers slid across their untreated parking lot, including the director himself.

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Author

Chris Allen