If there’s anything good that comes out of working for a micromanaging boss, it’s that their ridiculous rules and methods usually blow up in their faces in some way.

In today’s story, a worker talked about how they responded when their boss presented them with a request that they knew would eventually backfire.

Check out what they had to say.

The owner wanted me to record every daily work task, so I did.

“The small business owner I work for is a terrible person for many reasons. He feels entitled to do whatever he wants, as it’s his business.

This sounds fun!

Which includes: giving multiple people wrong information and becoming angry when it takes time to figure out who was told what and why, giving employees’ work to other employees without telling them so tasks are often duplicated or done incorrectly, and demanding zero communication between employees (jobs randomly change, coworkers leave or new ones appear without explanation, etc).

So he got a new Operations Manager who told me to fill out a daily task list, listing every task I intend to do, what I ended up doing, how long it took, with remarks.

You got it!

So I said, ‘ Sure, I can do that!’

For the first 3 days I spent a solid 1.5 hours combined writing it all down. Every time a 5 minute task ballooned into a half hour because of poor communication. Duplicated tasks and noting how they happened due to the owner’s meddling.

Noting details of quick tasks being delayed due to broken equipment the owner didn’t want to fix.

My owner, who had been thinking I didn’t do anything all day, looked at my lists of endless tasks (which were ‘nothing’ according to him) and blew his stack.

He couldn’t take looking at a huge list of work that was taking so long because it was bouncing from one person to another, in an attempt to clarify what the owner had been telling others behind the scenes.

Because I knew he didn’t want to change, was not going to, and there was no way to circumvent this because it was by direction.

A guy who lived on being confusing, with no processes in place, so he was accountable for nothing while making his employees accountable for everything.

He never looked at my task list again.”

Reddit users spoke up.

This person shared a story.

And another reader chimed in.

Just following orders, boss!

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