Workplace power struggles rarely end well for the employee, but this story is a bit of an exception.

One call center worker dealt with a toxic HR department that loved throwing its authority around and overruling even managers, so he learned it was safer to simply follow their instructions without question.

That decision eventually turned a system mistake into months of easier overtime work for him.

You’ll want to keep reading for this one!

Don’t question HR? Can do!

This story happened a while back when I was working at a union call center for a large telecom.

At this particular call center, the HR people really enjoyed letting everyone know that they had the power to override even management and that there was nothing anyone could do about it.

This employee learned early on just how toxic HR could be.

My first brush with them seemed pretty innocent on my side, but it taught me the kind of people they were.

I was pulled off the phones to work a special project and was told that HR had been informed that I was not to go on the phones even for a “queue bust.”

When HR asked me to go on the phones, I mentioned what my manager had told me.

But HR seemed to think they outranked everyone else.

HR told me to get on the phones anyway, which I did (my manager was not on that day).

The next time my manager was in, I got dressed down for “insubordination” to HR.

This company went through several revisions to the offline (offline meaning no customer calls) department that I worked in.

One of the changes was giving us different phone logins depending on whether we were taking customer calls or interdepartmental calls.

HR was ruling the place with an iron fist.

Now at this time, HR had been running everyone into the ground by requiring 10 hours of overtime every week.

That overtime had to be done on customer calls.

So during a normal day of offline work, I would log into the interdepartmental line and take calls from co-workers across the country.

Then for my two hours of overtime, I would switch over to the external line and take my two hours of customer calls.

I would have preferred to only take the interdepartmental calls.

Overall, the employee felt that his hands were tied.

Rumor had it that our center was the only one that made offline workers do online work.

Because union or not, we were in a right-to-work state and the contract was not strongly enforced.

There wasn’t much I could do about that. I just tried to do my job and not be “insubordinate” anymore.

This is where the malicious compliance comes in.

HR never seemed to care that their actions actively made everyone else’s lives harder.

HR had a habit, when they called a queue bust, of switching the call gating of my department’s offline IDs so that we received customer calls on that line instead of just asking us to switch IDs.

Then when the queue bust was over, they’d gate us back to the internal calls.

This caused its own issues since offline agents are not always at their desks when they get re-gated. Meaning sometimes customers are met with several minutes of silence.

What happened one evening, however, was that I was already on my overtime.

The employee was just trying to do their job when HR royally messed up, once again.

I was logged into my online ID and taking customer calls when they called a queue bust and shunted all the offline team to taking calls.

Then when the queue bust was over, they shunted us all back to offline.

Including myself, who was actually logged into my online ID.

This showed how incompetent HR really was.

Why would they bother to check things like that?

It takes too much time away from being a colossal jerk.

What this meant for me was that for the last couple of months I worked in the offline department, all of my overtime was easy-as-pie internal calls.

And none of the shouting rage of customer calls.

He’s prepared to let this go on as long as possible.

Of course, I wouldn’t dream of trying to tell HR that they had made a mistake with my call gating.

I didn’t want to be subordinate, after all!

Yet another tale of HR going way out of bounds.

What did Reddit think?

It’s clear there’s not a clear separation of roles at this company.

This user thinks HR was given far too much power from the start.

Something isn’t adding up for this commenter.

HR wanted total obedience, and that’s exactly what they got.

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.