Are you sure you mean EVERYTHING, boss?

Okay, whatever you say!

Let me go ahead and say that you’re gonna get a kick out of this story from Reddit’s “Malicious Compliance” page.

Check out what happened!

Boss told me to “measure everything.” Lost the sale.

“I’m mechanic at a national chain.

We have a service called “brake inspection” that is free.

I get .25 hour commission on it.

Although with this company we only get paid commission if our commission earnings are greater than our hourly guarantee and it’s averaged for a whole week.

So this week I’m too far behind on commission to make any.

I’ll just get my hourly.

A car rolled in with a complaint of brake squealing.

This is pretty common and is not a serious concern usually, but people want something done so I’ll sell them brakes if they want to waste $600 to get less noise.

Anyways I put the car in the air and spun the back wheel and it made a pretty bad squeal.

He knew the problem…

The wear indicator seemed to be the cause.

It’ll rub on the rotor when the pads are too low.

Also I could see the rotors were really scored pretty deep.

Just from that alone I knew it needed rear pads and rotors.

I would have just quickly checked if the fronts were really bad so I could suggest that as well.

Before I could even do that my boss says “take the wheels off. Do a REAL brake inspection. Measure EVERYTHING.”

Okay…

Cue MC.

Now like I said I’m not making commission this week so it doesn’t matter to me if I sell work or just hang out.

So I pull up the specs for the brake system on that car and I get to measuring EVERYTHING.

About 45 minutes later my boss comes by and I’ve measured 1 set of pads and rotors.

Thickness at 8 points.

Parallelism, runout.

Pad thickness at 4 points.

Taper long-wise, across and at angles.

He asks how it’s looking.

I mention the rotors are within spec for thickness but out of spec for runout (warped) and parallelism.

And the pads are cracked.

Basically saying it’s good but it’s not.

Not a real answer.

He comes back after about 90 minutes total and I’m about to start the last wheel.

Almost done!

The customer has grown tired of waiting and he asks me if I have a recommendation.

I say it might need front brakes, and probably needs rear but i’m not done measuring.

He comes back a couple minutes later and says the customer decided he wants to leave.

Just finish the inspection and roll it out.

So I finish up, I recommend rear brakes and suggest front brakes.

The customer comes over to get car from me and says he might come back Monday.

Pretty sure we lost the sale.

Later one of the lube techs is bantering with him about how measuring everything (just what is normally on the inspection sheet) takes at least 15 minutes.

The boss is saying it should take 5-10 minutes just as I walk in and he says “not an hour” and gives me an accusing look.

I just reply “you said measure everything”.”

Check out what Reddit users had to say about this.

This reader chimed in.

Another individual shared their thoughts.

This Reddit user shared a story.

Another individual had a lot to say.

He was just doing what he was told!

It takes as long as it takes.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.