Malicious Compliance

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/StendhalSyndrome on 2025-01-10 16:21:32+00:00.

For reference this took place back in the late 90's. I'd imagine school systems work much different at the HS level now, and my kids aren't that old yet.

Okay so it was my senior year of HS and I had had just enough credits in my Junior year to graduate. I had taken martial arts and taught it too so I got an extra gym credit early, I changed my mind because I wanted to graduate with my friends. So I just loaded up my schedule that year with whatever I wanted or I thought would look good to colleges. A few AP courses like US GOV, Physics, Anatomy & Physiology and some random stuff. The AP'S were a lot of work and, I had good test scores from last year already and I wasn't looking to get lower scores on classes I didn't care about so I dropped Physics/Gov and a random Jewelery 2 class. So I had 3 open periods a day surrounding lunch. It was magical, and i still had 1 AP class so I though I wasn't messing around too much. Both my parents worked so we didn't know anything was amiss. Till we realized we had a broken answering machine...again it was the 90's.

Apparently my school was calling 3x a day every day to tell us I wasn't showing up to some study hall class I had been assigned to after I dropped the few classes. This hadn't happened other years as It would just be a free period.

The funny part was the woman calling us was kind of a bitch about it. After the first few days the messages started to get nasty...yet no one said word one to me in the school, or was anything sent home. This is also around the time my mom was starting her retirement from being a hair stylist, so she'd do like a week on and a week off, and now she was getting the calls. So she tells the woman, shes okay with it, his grades are good, technically he could have graduated already, college aps are already out, so no biggie.

Oh that was apparently the wrong thing to say to this lady cause she read my mom the riot act. Going on about how irresponsible we all were and how she was personally going to tank my applications, how could I be so brazen, etc etc etc etc crazy level of over reaction. Plus she wouldn't stop calling for every single class despite my parents approval, repeated calls to the school, and eventually they showed up face to face.

It was by law they had to report un-pre-approved truancy. So my mom sat down on it, they wouldn't accept their word over the phone or even face to face that I was allowed to leave (as I had previous years w/ 0 issues...) they wanted something in writing. I don't think any of it was legal or necessary because the lady was telling my parents they had to put all kinds of stuff like they knew they were being detrimental to my learning...were essentially bad parents etc etc etc...crazy stuff.

So my mom gets an idea. She says 100% they aren't writing anything like that, she looks it up and it is a law that if a student has an unexcused absence they have to notify the parents. So she started playing dumb making this lady call her up Every. Single. Period. I missed. Then she would hem and haw about hmm do I allow him to miss this period or is it a problem...hmmm. lemme think. Then she'd say make sure, it's okay ...this one time, but to call me if he misses anything else because I'm not sure how I'd feel if he missed more...knowing full well I was missing 3 periods a day every day till I graduated.

They finally stopped calling like a month before I graduated. It was a solid 5 months of my mom messing with this woman named Sarah.

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/I_aim_to_sneeze on 2025-01-10 10:59:08+00:00.

When I was little, my mom sent me to a private/religious school. My family isn’t religious, but they felt like I’d get a better education there (and when I switched to public school later I found they were right, I was pretty far ahead).

This school had uniforms: boys wore button down shirts with the school logo and blue slacks, girls wore jumpers.

My mom hated cleaning and ironing these white, button down shirts every day. I was one of 4 kids. Kids play and get grass stains. The shirts were taking up a lot of her time. Finally, she gave up and bought a bunch of white polo shirts and started sending us to school in those. Admin had a conniption fit about it, and brought her in for a meeting. They opened the dress code rulebook and pointed out that these shirts were missing the logo, so they were in violation. My mom looked over the rules and confirmed that the lack of a logo was the only violation. They said yes. She thanked them and left, and the school probably thought it was over. Just to be petty, they sent a school wide memo regarding the dress code.

My mom took every polo shirt and stitched a homemade school logo onto them. It wasn’t hard to do as the “logo” was just the school initials. Admin was furious, but during the next meeting realized their hands were tied.

The memo piqued the curiosity of other parents, and they started asking my mom where she got the “new school shirts.” Apparently she wasn’t the only one sick of ironing and getting grass stains out. Suddenly, I wasn’t the only one wearing a polo shirt to school.

The worst part for the school was that, despite tuition being pretty expensive, they also had a kickback deal going with a local clothing store for the uniforms. The store had a monopoly on the sale of those shirts. When business started lagging, the store made their own version of the polos for sale. Eventually the original shirts were phased out entirely.

That was over 30 years ago, and my mom still loves telling that story.

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/AtomicFile_ on 2025-01-10 04:55:34+00:00.

So, let me tell you about my dear neighbor Karen—yes, that Karen. You know the type: clipboard, self-righteous attitude, always sniffing out problems that don’t exist. She’s not even on the HOA board, but she acts like she’s the president of the universe.

The issue started when I decided to brighten up my yard with some colorful flowers. Nothing crazy—just some daisies, tulips, and a little garden patch. Harmless, right? Well, not according to Karen.

One afternoon, she stomps over, waving her little HOA rulebook like it’s the Bible and she’s Moses coming down the mountain. “Those flowers aren’t in compliance,” she screeches. “You’re violating section 12.4! Only native plants are allowed.”

I try to reason with her. “Karen, the HOA guidelines just say the yard has to be well-maintained. These flowers are fine.”

But no, Karen wasn’t having it. She said she was going to report me to the HOA because “rules are rules.” Fine. You want me to follow the rules, Karen? I’ll follow the rules.

So, I did some research and found every obnoxious native plant I could get my hands on. Thorny bushes? Check. Spiky grasses? Check. A massive yucca plant that looks like it wants to eat small animals? Oh, you better believe I planted that front and center.

By the time I was done, my yard looked like a post-apocalyptic jungle—but every single plant was 100% native to the area. And, let me tell you, I double-checked the HOA guidelines to make sure I was bulletproof.

Karen comes stomping back a week later, furious. “This is unacceptable!” she yells, flailing her clipboard. “Your yard looks terrible!”

“Oh, Karen,” I said, with the sweetest smile I could muster. “You were so right. My flowers weren’t compliant. But these are all native plants, just like the rules you pointed out. Isn’t it great?”

She sputtered like a broken engine and ran off to the HOA. They reviewed my yard and, guess what? Completely compliant. Karen ended up getting a warning from the board for harassing neighbors.

Now I sit on my porch, sipping coffee, surrounded by my chaotic jungle of compliance, while Karen avoids making eye contact every time she walks by. It’s the little victories, you know?

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Small_Tooth on 2025-01-09 13:49:32+00:00.

Backstory: For the passed few years I've been a nurse. I spent the first part of my career in the emergency at a small hospital in Canada (we can do basic admissions, surgeries and critical care but will transfer the really sick ones to larger metropolitan hospitals with more services like cardiology or trauma surgery). Because the population we served was so small, we ran with the bare minimum of nurses to keep the department afloat, usually resulting in an extra patient per nurse compared to other hospitals but with a lower acuity level (on average) so it balances out. As a result, we would often be overwhelmed during the second half of the day shift and the start of the night shift when it was most busy but due to low volumes of patients later on in the night we often were well enough staffed to easily handle the workload (i.e. we could safely run even fewer nurses, but management hadn't gone there). Secondly, because we ran with such a small number of nurses, we never had break cover, so if your nursing partner was on break you would watch double the number of patients (not a big deal at night but during day this could result in missing our last 30 minute unpaid break on the day shift due to high workload). A last piece of info is that we used teams of one "emergency" nurse (a nurse extra training to have a higher scope of care) and one "med-surge" nurse (seasoned nurse awaiting a spot in the additional training program). Because of this, the nurses would give and take report together, so instead of each nurse handing over 4-5 patients simultaneously they hand over 8-10 together, so report takes twice as long.

Our union had negotiated our contract to counteract any wage theft, allowing us to sign for our unpaid thirty minute break at overtime rates of 1.5x pay (we missed this break maybe every other day shift, so once during a two day, two night rotation) as well as sign for an additional 15 minutes of straight time pay in case handover went over our 12 hour shift (which was always). Of course, management didn't like having to pay this out, but it wasn't an issue because we (the nurses) were also stealing time. I know it doesn't sound great, but on those quiet night shifts, we would often take an extra 30 - 45 minutes to sleep, which balanced out those 1.5-2 hours of lost pay from the day shifts and handover. Because the workload was so low at the time and because only one emergency physician was on at night, it could be easily managed by one nurse, so patient throughput was the same as if two nurses were working (we often sit around waiting for orders from the doctor). Furthermore, nurses always left their number with their partner so we could be called back early if it kicked off and needed all hands on deck. Obviously, if we had many very sick patients, we stuck to the entitled amount only or missed it entirely. Everyone was happy for the first few years I worked there, the management (and therefore government) saved the extra pay without affecting patient throughput and the extra sleep time on break really helped to maintain nurse well-being as well as making the switch from nights back to days much easier.

Then one of our less-pleasant charge nurses got angry at this. The charge nurse role is like the boss of the unit. On most units with admitted patients, this was a an 0800-1600 Monday to Friday type gig that was covered by regular bedside nurses when the charge nurse wasn't there. In emergency however, we had specific nurses working rotating shifts in this role with a small pay bump and any gaps in the schedule filled by very senior emergency nurses as it was a much more unique beast to manage. I say this only to give benefit of the doubt that this nurse was probably stressed out like crazy every shift. So I'm sitting at work in the morning, waiting for the inevitable onslaught when the email pops up stating night shifts are to be limited to union mandated break time only. I'm a bit pissed off at it, but ultimately they're right. We're only entitled to a 60 minutes of unpaid break time and 45 minutes of paid break time. And to be fair, some nurses were definitely abusing the previous system (one nurse who covered charge would advocate for over 3.5 hours of break time on a night shift regardless of how sick the patients were and that would affect patient safety as it bled into the first part of the night when we actually still busy, most of the nurses refused to follow them on this). However, people like this were rare, most nurses don't come to the emergency to be lazy.

This email soon gets posted in our group chats so everyone's aware. A lot of the younger staff (millennials at this time) were aware of our rights and immediately started signing for all missed breaks as well as additional handover time as well as helping the older staff understand the contract. I missed my last break that shift and stayed until quarter past shift change for report, so I got an extra $50 gross on my paycheque for that. The charge nurse on that day was surprised when I presented to OT form for their signature, but I just told them I was following the rules to prevent any pay discrepancies. My next shift (at night) there was a sign in sheet on the desk for us to write our in and out time for breaks (with a space for our phone number too, so they could call us back, even though were weren't payed the extra $4 an hour to be on call and calling us back should have been paid at overtime rates per the contract). I refused to leave my number, stating that unless there was a code blue (medical emergency-usually means there's no pulse) there was no way I was coming back early. Code blues were called overhead, so they didn't need my number. For the next two weeks, I stuck to the contract. Every missed break and extended handover was documented, and of course I signed in and out of my breaks on the dot. I spent so much time on night shifts staring at my phone waiting for the doctor to give me something to do as I'd caught up on everything else. It might not seem like a lot, but that extra hour of handover pay + occasional missed breaks per shift set would have added up to roughly $2000 extra per year per full time nurse, which is a decent amount of change to a publicly funded healthcare system. Eventually the manager noticed and came around clarifying that while they would sign for any extra wages if we wished, we could also choose to sleep extra on nights if we wished providing we left our number. I asked for them to email that to me, and while I could have sent that straight to the union rep I didn't bother, as I had already gotten the sleep time back.

I left that job later on and have been very happy at a much bigger hospital for 2 years now. Now I have a nurse come cover mine and my partner's break, there's no "teams", and they encourage us to take longer breaks when possible to prevent staff burnout (which was really prevalent at this one). I now document my missed breaks and extra sleep time to make sure it matches up. They're also willing to sign for missed breaks on top of that to help staff retention but my conscious doesn't let me go that far. I'm just happy to sleep.

TL;DR Told to not take longer sleep breaks on quiet night shifts, so we start claiming unpaid OT from day shifts.

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/namnamkm on 2025-01-09 04:32:40+00:00.

So Vietnam just implemented a new law that fines heavily people who don't comply by traffic lights. About 5 to 20 million dong, which is about 1-2 months of average wage here. This causes situation where even when there is an emergency situation, like an ambulance or a fire truck need passing through, many people just won't move to let those cars passing by. Some comments on the internet even said they would rather let a stranger die than let their family hungry.

Yea, idk. I think it is malicious for sure. There are of course rules that stated if you disobey traffic rules in emergency situation, you won't be fined, but it seems like many people won't risk it or they just don't know the rules that well. I personally would move for emergency vehicles so I'm not exactly thrilled with this.

Edit: grammar

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Riyeko on 2025-01-08 22:47:03+00:00.

So a few years ago I got back into truck driving after my daughter was around 2-3 years old. There weren't many companies who would take someone that had been out of the game that long, so I had to settle on one of the bigger companies.

What a mistake that was.

Before this I had no issueas as professional truck driver, with having driver facing (or inward facing) cameras. I don't do anything illegal or stupid behind the wheel, so it didnt matter.

It does now.

This company had stuck the camera that faced inwards and outwards along the area where the visor would cover the windshield. As most things like this happen, it was a "recordable offense" to have the visor not only block our the sun from laser beaming me in the face, but having the visor down blocked the camera.

I got calls about it constantly.

I asked them what I should do. Don't cover the camera. But the sun limits my vision. Don't cover the camera. I can't stick anything on the windshield to block the sun, this is unsafe. What do you want me to do? Dont block the camera. Can you move it somewhere else? No. How am I supposed to see during sunrise and sunset hours? Don't block the camera.

It came down to them threatening my job (and livelihood) that if I blocked the camera one more time, they'd to remotely deactivate the truck and force me out with a local police escort.

So. I started to find nice safe places to stop every single early morning and evening when I was driving, where the sun would come through the windshield. My dispatcher (understanding of a man that he is) asked me why loads were being late and why I was stopping so frequently for so many hours. So I told him. Safety wouldn't compromise and I can't freaking see out the window with the sun laser beaming me in the face. I'm not crashing into someone because a damned camera is being blocked when i haven't done anything to warrant this kind of abuse. I apologized to him but told him this would continue.

He was able to schedule loads out to where I had the stopping time, but ultimately they fired me anyway after 5 months.

Bonus... I was told I was unsafe, stupid, shouldn't drive a truck, should find work that fits a woman better, and that I wouldn't be hireable anywhere, even in those sketchy second chance companies where the pay, equipment and safety is crap.

Jokes on them. After 2 years of running for a company that treats me like I'm a human being and not some seat warming robot, 4 of their little company trucks have been seen by little ole me in the ditch or median on i29 this year after a two day winter storm. My truck? Still running. Currently waiting on unload.

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/SmokeyMoonMan on 2025-01-08 17:03:40+00:00.

I work as a breakfast cook for the largest hotel chain in the world at a 4 star, single lettered hotel in the largest French speaking province in Canada.

Each cook is given a stipend of 200$ to buy personal equipment (peelers, rasps, knives, etc.).

I bought a 7 inch non stick, ceramic frying pan for myself. They have 7 inch Teflon pans here already, but due to people not taking care of them, they are mostly scratched.

It is worth noting that our current chef was brought in to lower the costs of the kitchen, so our quality of food has gone down drastically.

During the holiday break while I was off, they bought new egg pans, but they were 8 inches instead of our traditional 7.

When I filed my receipt, I was told by HR that the pan I bought wouldn't be reimbursed (I paid 35$ for it). They told me that the hotel is supposed to cover the cost of pans, so too bad, so sad.

Ok, fine then. I will use your larger pans for omelettes.

Now, our omelettes are too big for the plates and I have to use more inventory to make the omelettes look like we aren't skimping on our product.

Good thing you guys wouldn't pay me back for the pan that costs half the price of what you bought the new pans for at a larger size and cost.

And now I have a nice egg pan for at home!

Whenever Whatever!

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/reallyfuckintired on 2025-01-08 05:10:01+00:00.

TLDR; I can't book a hotel using my company credit that is in my contract that I'm allowed to do? Have fun paying more than double for the room.

I work remotely for a small company (~100 employees) and based on my contract, I have to return to the office for a week 4 times a year. The last time I went back up was in November. In the contract, it's laid out that my employer pays 100% of hotel and gas/airfare.

Normally this is an extremely uneventful routine, it's a mid-sized Midwestern city with not much to do, it is what it is. A few months before I went back up we had our financial audit and one thing that was pointed out to our accounting department was a lack of controls on purchasing. The way it used to be was every manager/supervisor had a company credit card with a $1,500 balance and as long as we stayed under that limit, we didn't have to do any kind of purchase orders.

After our audit, my accounting team decided to make purchase orders 100% of their focus. Going forward, it doesn't matter what it was, what the situation was, if you didn't have an approved purchase order you could not make the transaction. All this happened in early October as I was trying to book my hotel for my on site week in November. Normally I have freedom in choosing when I go onsite, but I was requested to go that specific week by my CEO and CFO as we were launching some strategic planning and they wanted me onsite.

So I put the purchase order in for the hotel and I don't hear anything back. I forget about it for a couple weeks then remember mid October that I still don't have a hotel room booked. When I initially made the request it was about $550 for 4 nights. Looking again in mid October it was now up to $700 for 4 nights. I look around and noticed that same week I'm supposed to go up there's a concert in the same city followed by a big college sporting event in that town. I send an email to my accounting folks that I need to book a hotel, rates are going up, room availability is going down, yadda yadda yadda. I get a tersely worded email back saying that everyone has different priorities and my purchase order will be addressed once all the ones before it are done.

So I sit back and wait and keep checking every other day and keep seeing prices go up. I send a weekly email asking if it's approved yet and I keep getting absolute silence back. Finally a week before I email my accounting team with the CFO included saying if I don't book a room that day, there wouldn't be any left and I wouldn't be able to make it up for the strategic planning work. About 30 minutes later I get back an email that says word for word: "You are authorized to reserve a hotel room for 4 nights".

Cool, I book it, that $550 room is now $1,200. I book it and move on with my life and don't think any of it. Last week, I got around to uploading my credit card receipts and submitted my expense report which included that $1,200 hotel stay. I got a call from my CFO today just exploding on me, furious about where the hell did I stay that cost that much and what was I thinking. I very calm just forwarded the original purchase order and all the emails I sent saying that prices were raising. I had dead silence on the phone as he read through the email chains and just said 'for fucks sake' then hung up. At the end of the day all supervisors got an email that the purchase order system was being shutdown until they could figure out how to manage it better.

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/leaveleaves on 2025-01-07 22:56:41+00:00.

I work a service industry adjacent position that requires a flexible schedule. I've been fine with this, and take a day or two off when possible. I worked 18 days straight over Christmas, with my first "day off" being New Year's Eve. I didn't schedule time off, I just didn't get scheduled. The day before NYE, my boss asked for me to cover a shift. I told him I was going out of town. He allowed it, but when we talked next, he said

"I was upset when you said you couldn't work, because you hadn't scheduled time off on the schedule. I thought I was going to get a day off finally, so I was disappointed when you told me you weren't able to help"

I explained since it was both the holiday, and my first day off in over 2 week, I didn't think I had to officially schedule it as "time off", but I will in the future.

Guess who suddenly has scheduled "time off" for every Saturday and Sunday for the foreseeable future?

I'm so done.

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/beenhollow on 2025-01-07 15:58:09+00:00.

I worked at a gas station during covid. It was terrible for a lot of reasons so I searched for better jobs. I eventually found and interviewed for one on a Friday and got a job offer on the spot. I was scheduled to start Monday, which also happened to be my next gas station shift.

Immediately after the interview I called my gas station manager to tell them about the job offer. Without even asking what I called for, the manager began saying things like "the floor wasn't clean enough, that wasn't stocked enough, XYZ". When I eventually got a word in I told them "There's actually something I wanted to talk to you about" and the manager replied "Well can it wait until Monday?" At that point I was so utterly done with that job that I told the manager,

"Yes. It can wait until Monday."

When Monday came along I showed up at the gas station well before my scheduled shift, to turn in my key before starting my other job. When the manager saw me there early they knew something was up and so came outside to meet me. I told them about the new job and asked if the gas station could increase my wage to match. The manager told me "You know I can't do that," and I said "Okay, then I'm gonna take the other job" before handing over my key. My manager asked "why did you wait until now to tell me?" and I replied "Because you asked me to." The manager didn't say another word to me, but after a pause let out a long groan. Then I got in my car and never looked back.

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Glowing_Trash_Panda on 2025-01-08 07:55:52+00:00.

So my parents bought the river/stilt house next to their house for me to move into to help me out in a number of ways. That’s super awesome & I’m forever grateful, however, my mother doesn’t like to always think things through & rush them & god forbid you disagree with her. So, it happened that, apparently, I just HAD to get moved to the river house before this recent blizzard hit or the world would fall apart or something.

Ok, fine. But the problem is, is that the previous owner died halfway through renovating the place & it doesn’t have functional water & sewer. But, my mother in her infinite wisdom decides that doesn’t matter & that I can just walk next door to my parents place every time I need to use the bathroom until my dad finishes getting the water/sewer done. She said he would finish it the day or the next after I officially got moved. And then she said the quote that is the title.

Well, I know my dad & that was never gonna happen. And while I’m no stranger to having to piss in a bucket or in a hole in the ground when camping- needing to poop & having to do it in a trash bag in a bucket & then having to deal with that, is something that I just do not want to have to do.

I’ve been here 4 days now & while I tried to not eat/barely eat over the weekend (I got moved Saturday before the storm hit) in hopes my dad would be able to finish the water/sewer (all the outside stuff is done, just needs the inside the house stuff done) on Sunday or Monday- that didn’t happen.

So, I finally had to eat some actual food & not just candy to keep my blood sugar up come Monday & Tuesday cuz I was starting to get super woozy & dizzy. Well, it’s 0100 in the middle of the night now & I woke up with NATURE FRICKEN CALLING.

So I as quickly as I could without having an accident, threw my outside gear on (it’s currently almost 0 Fahrenheit at my house outside) to run over to my parents house next door, only to discover that their door wouldn’t open. The handle would turn but the door wasn’t budging (it was stuck cuz it was frozen) so I proceeded to use my old “cop knock” from my EMS days to get one of them to open up cuz I’m about to shit my pants right there on their porch at this point.

My mom comes & opens the door a second later (thank jeebus) & tries to lecture me on that I didnt need to scare her & dad awake @ 1am, meanwhile I’m running to their bathroom while pulling my pants down & just loudly yelled “I GOTTA F*CKING SHIT & I AINT USING A TRASH BAG!”

After taking care of business, I went to go back to my new house & my mom mentions that maybe she shouldn’t have had me move before the water/sewer was hooked up….

I will continue to not give a f*ck about waking her up at night if I need to take care of business. She said I could come over any time I needed to do so to use their bathroom & it’s not like I can schedule when my body needs to do it’s thing to only happen during normal waking hours. Oh well. Maybe now she might actually start to listen when people try to point out why she shouldn’t rush certain things (it probably won’t happen but a girl can dream).

Edit to add- I’m paying my parents back for this new house once my old house sells with the proceeds left over after the mortgage is taken care of. The new house is a stilt house on a river bank that they got for only 20k, it’s not like they just bought me a house outright to give to me. And the move easily could have waited another week (the old house was completely livable- mom is just irrationally impatient about things & doesn’t listen to others at all when she gets an idea in her head about how things should go)

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/nonbinaryunicorn on 2025-01-07 18:52:30+00:00.

This is short and sweet.

I work at a preschool that teaches 18 month to 5 year olds. I'm with the 18 month to 2 year range.

During snack this morning, I'm encouraging a boy to put his leftover snack in his cup to throw away. He is easily distracted, so he wanders off when I have to stop another kid from trying to get the hand sanitizer on her own.

The other teacher in the room tells the boy to throw his cup away and I watch as he dumps out his leftover pretzels and throw just the cup away.

He did throw away the pretzels on his own after but it made me giggle that he followed the letter and not the spirit of the directions.

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/tynorex on 2025-01-07 15:03:07+00:00.

Just read the other top post about taking a bank survey repeatedly and it reminded me of my survey story.

About three years ago, my wife and I bought our house. We realized at the time that most of the house maintenance was poorly maintained (renters used to live in the house before us). One of the larger projects that needed to be done was a full driveway replacement, as the original driveway hadn't been refinished or maintained in almost 30 years.

Knowing that we would need to replace the driveway, my wife and I started planning ahead for the eventual project. We decided at the time that we would also like to expand our driveway. We are one of only three houses in my neighborhood to not have a three car garage. so we decided that we would expand our driveway out so that we could at least have a third stall, even if it was outside of our garage.

In order to expand the driveway, we had to get three bids out, bid one was for the driveway people themselves, one was to our underground sprinklers maintenance as the expansion would move our existing lines, and finally, due to our land not being 100% flat, the final bid was to a landscaper to build a retaining wall in order to create a flat enough spot to expand our driveway.

Due to the various companies working on this project, it meant that we had to make sure all three companies could work within the same timelines. The sprinklers were simple enough and not really an issue. The driveway people were great and gave us over a month of wiggle room to make everything work. The problem came from the landscaping company, we made them intimately aware of our timelines and explained the scope of the work, and they assured us multiple times that the deadlines would work.

We had the landscapers scheduled for the first week after the driveway was ripped up, however the landscapers never showed up. We called and rescheduled for the next week, and again the landscapers didn't show up. This happened twice more before it was literally the day before the driveway people were due back to finish the driveway and the landscaping still was not done.

The landscapers finally showed up and I talked to them before I left for work that day, gave them my cell phone and some gatorades before I left and told them if there were any issues to please call me immediately. Got home from work to find 0 progress done on the project. Turns out the second I had left, the landscapers packed up and went to another job.

I actually called the owner and bitched out his team. I have never been so mad about something. The project manager called me back and assured me that they wanted the driveway done first and the landscaping would follow and that he personally would fix anything that was messed up as a result.

Fine. The driveway was poured and the results were to be expected, pretty brutal. About a week later the landscapers finally built their wall and the then added some finishing crap to the driveway, it looked terrible, especially for a brand new driveway. They then sent me my bill for the completed job. I immediately wrote back with pictures and explained that I was not paying for this job until it didn't look like shit and that I expected the landscapers to fix the mess they made.

Well I got ignored, at this point they had started ignoring most of my communications. Until that is, about 3 months passed and the landscaper realized I was serious about not paying for their shoddy work. They reached out to me to figure out what was going on, which is when they finally looked at my email about the terrible work and my refusal to pay. By this point in time, it was Christmas and everything around me was frozen.

The landscaper lamented not having a chance to fix their shoddy work before months had passed and I lamented them ignoring my communications about the project being subpar in the first place. We discussed some ways to "fix" their fuckup and settled on one that would at least make things look nicer, but would reduce my driveway width by about a foot, a solution I didn't like, but would at least mostly fix my issues. I left for work one day and came home to my driveway "fixed". No note, no communications, they just came in and did it one day when they had time. Again, not exactly how I would have wanted it, but it was okay.

My wife and I went back and forth before ultimately deciding to just pay everything, swear off the landscaper forever and move on. The whole project had taken over six months and we were just done with it all. We paid the bill and moved on. About five months later, just before spring/summer was set to start, the landscaper started spamming my inbox with requests for reviews, this is right when most project biddings go out, so they were looking to boost their online visibility and to get projects for the next year.

I ignored the first 10 or so emails that came through before deciding, maybe I can actually write them a review. And I did. I wrote the exact experience I had with them, highlighted the lack of communication, the unprofessionalism, the frequent missed deadlines, and I even included pictures!

Within a week i received a Google reward because my review had over a thousand views. The owner actually called me after another week and asked what he could do to make things right, which I told him that we were almost a year from the original project, without a time machine, there wasn't much we could do.

All in all the project was kind of a failure, we expanded the driveway, but now it is a very tight squeeze and so people rarely use the third slot. I now mostly just get mad when I see the retaining wall. I did get a ton of Google rewards for my review and I hope it saved a ton of people the headache I went through with the landscaper.

I was content with letting them screw me over and just moving on with a lesson learned, but they were persistent with their email campaign. Maybe don't ask people you screwed over to write you reviews?

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Wakemeup3000 on 2025-01-06 22:29:03+00:00.

One of my banks merged and then closed the branch that was in my town. The closest branch was a 30 minute drive so I did all my banking on line. At some point I had to do something and online wasn't working out so I drove to the closest branch. I stood in line, got to the counter and was told 'You could have done this online.' I got pissed about this comment probably more than I should have but ok let's play.

Me: You know I tried for about 15 minutes and kept getting an error so I waited until this morning, tried again, got the same error and decided to drive a half hour for help.

CSR: You could have called the toll free number for assistance.

Me: Or I could have come here for help.

CSR: Yes but calling might have solved the issue.

Me: Ok let's do this instead. Let's close the accounts and that'll solve the issue.

At this point the manager steps in and tries to sooth things over. Nope. 'You know there's no reason for me to have to spend a hour of my time driving to and from a bank. I could move this money to AA, BB, CC, or DD which are all 6 minutes from my house.'

Manager closes out the accounts, gives me a check, and out I go. Drive back to my town and throw the money in another bank. Then I get an email asking me to take a survey so I did and noted all the above. The next day I signed into my account online and it generated another survey request. I clicked in and took the survey again and copied and pasted the replies to a google doc. That way when I checked my account on line every single day and a new survey request was made every single day I could take it in a minute.

So far I've done it daily for over a month. Whey keep asking for my opinion so who am I not to oblige?

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Hulla_Sarsaparilla on 2025-01-04 20:35:32+00:00.

This was ages ago, one day my car wouldn’t start, and I realised my breakdown cover didn’t include home start.

I looked up online how to add it to my policy and spotted there was a discount for upping my policy going via their website, so I added it on and called them up with my new policy in place so they’d send someone out.

Breakdown person: I see you’ve just upgraded your policy, but that’s not valid to now use immediately for us to send someone out, you need to pay a £££ surcharge for that.

Me: But I didn’t have the right cover so how else could I do it?

Breakdown person: you needed to call us and pay the £££, the online price isn’t for when you’re already broken down

Me: ok, how long do I need to leave it between having paid the premium and having broken down?

Breakdown person: Three days, it’s not valid now, how would you like to pay?

Me: ok, my car is perfectly fine parked up for three days, I’ll call back in three days

Breakdown person: You can’t do that because…. (Mumbles, doesn’t really know why)

Me: Calls back in three days, they sent someone out

Cheeky robbing bastards taking advantage of people being genuinely stranded and having no option but to pay 🤬

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/AJWeddy123 on 2025-01-04 10:21:08+00:00.

I worked in a shared office space and my boss wanted me to inform my coworkers any time I left my station…..even if it was brief. Even for bathroom breaks. I mean, where could I be if not at my desk? At break, at lunch, or on the can. The first two I would have told my coworkers about anyway cuz I’m not a dick.

So then each time I had to take a bathroom break, I’d yell out to my coworkers- “Hey guys- heading down to the bathroom. I’ll be gone anywhere from 3-15 minutes, you know, depending.” It didn’t take long for my boss to turn a blind eye to my jackassery after that. Good times.

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/CatlessBoyMom on 2025-01-03 23:25:54+00:00.

This wasn't me, but a friend in high school. Emilina, that we called M.

We had one of those horrendous English teachers. The kind that you wouldn't call the fire department if she burst into flames. Let's call her Miss C.

Now Miss C absolutely HATED any student that "had" anything she thought should be hers. This included relationships. Unfortunately, Miss C was such a cranky rotten person that she had never managed to find a man willing to put up with her. You can probably imagine how she felt about girls that got married while in school. Even worse was when a girl got pregnant before graduation.

So my friend M got married right before senior year started. A shotgun wedding, which meant that when Miss C found out, she was an absolute monster to poor M. Being the diligent student M was she made it through most of senior year ok, but it was obviously hard. One day we were sitting in class and M raised her hand and Miss C just ignored her. After several minutes M stood up and said "Miss C, I need to go to the nurse."

Miss C snapped back "Just stay in your seat" and went right back to her lecture. M sat down quietly for a few more minutes then stood up and said "Miss C, my water just broke, can I go to the nurse now?" At first Miss C didn't believe her, but as soon as she got close enough to see M's skirt and the chair she freaked out yelling at M who meekly left the room and headed to the nurse.

M had a baby girl but didn't finish out our senior year. Miss C "went on leave" for the rest of the year, and didn't return the next fall.

Edit: added Emilina's name.

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/condiments4u on 2025-01-01 16:58:04+00:00.

Hi all, happy new years!

In reviewing some of my best memories of the last few years, I remembered an incident of malicious compliance that I found overwhelmingly satisfying and thought it'd be worth sharing. While not as outrageous as some of the stories here, it left me feeling like I stuck it to our corporate overlords a bit.

To set the stage, I moved back to the US to take a job at a pretty big firm where I was also tasked with executive assistant responsibilities. My boss would regularlys send me downstairs to out local bank to pick up and deposit cash. Having newly moved back to the US, I needed to set up a bank account for direct deposits and figured the one downstairs makes sense; also, it made depositing paychecks quicker and easier.

On the day I went to open the account, the manager of the branch sat me down to go through all the paperwork. She was nice enough at first and I got through everything quite quickly. That said, when it came to the signuate portion, I thought I'd have a bit of fun with it and create a silly signature; having just watched a Roman documentary the night before, I made my signature " the Great" (obviously, I used my first name in place of 'condiments'). The manager did non bat an eye at this (assuming she didn't read it), and said she'd process everything and give me a call when my card is ready to collect.

Cut to a little later, I receive a call from the manager saying there's something wrong with the paperwork and I needed to come down to correct it. When I ask what the problem is, she says that I'm not allowed to have a signature like that and I need to redo it using my actual name. I say okay and that I'll be right down.

This kinda pissed me off though, because I've seen wild signatures that hardly resemble letters, yet they were still accepted. I did some quick research and found that legally, a signature can be any mark that I plan on using consistently - it didn't have to be a name, nor even resemble letters! Being bored that day, I decided to press it and print out the laws regarding signatures and bring them with me to the bank. When I met the manager, I told her that I'd actually like to keep the signature as is and provided her with the documents I printed outlining the laws. She did not seem enthused at all and said she'd need a moment to discuss with her superiors. A few minutes later she comes back and says, while I'm correct about the law, they require the signature to match the one on my driver's license, since that's the one currently associated with me. I push back and mention that I wanted to have a new signature, but she was firm on it matching my ID or they wouldn't open my account.

Cue malicious compliance.

I reliazed then that, since the state I moved to was different from the one I lived in before, I had to legally update my license, so I told the manager I'd think it over and get back to her soon. I hurried upstairs and made a DMV appointment for later that week to get a new license.

The day of the DMV appoitment, I brought everything I needed to ensure I walked out with a new license. When it was time for me to provide a signature for the license, I again wrote " the Great", and was again met with pushback. The teller literally said "Sir, this is the DMV and we don't play games like that". Welp, I whiped out the law to show them that I am actually allowed to use this as my signature, and the teller's ego deflated real fast. Long story short, I walked out that day with a shiny new license and my new signature!

I drove directly from the DMV back to the bank and met with the teller. I told her that I will agree to sign the documents using the same signature on my license; I don't think she could have looked any more smug. She took me back to the office and sat me down to resign the documents, and I did so as " the Great". When she say this, she practically started shouting about how I'm wasting their time and either need to get serious or they'll have me escorted out. This is when I slowly removed my brand new ID and slid it across the desk. Her face went blank, and I honestly couldn't tell what she was thinking. She asked me to leave the office for a moment so she could make a call.

10 minutes later, she comes out and says, while my signature does match the one on my license, they are just refusing to do business with me and asked me to leave. Not knowing the legality of that, I said okay and accepted defeat.

I walked back up to my office and told y boss that they're not allowing me to open an account. I told him the full story, and he actually found it hilarious. He then said that he'd handle it. Later that day, I received a call from the bank saying that they changed their mind and that they've opened the checking and savings accounts I requested :D

I went to speak with my boss after who said that he had a productive chat with the manager. Knowing how much business he provides the bank, he was happy enough to bluff on my behalf. He essentially told the manager that not allowing me to open an account was directly affecting his business and that if they don't oblige, he'd close his accounts and take his business elsewhere. Apparently that threat hit hard and the manager quickly backtracked saying that they never refused my business, just had to get approval from upper management.

At the end of the day I was victorious, and still use this signture on all official documents. It's a bit silly, but it's my trophy and a good conversation starter.

tl;dr: A bank refused to open an account for me after signing the document with the Great. They said it had to matcht he signture on my ID, so I updated my license with the same signature.

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/TimeLuckBug on 2024-12-31 17:17:08+00:00.

When I was a teen and cleaned my hairbrush, my hairballs would land somewhere random when they fell out of my pocket I guess, or just because they were wild teen hairballs and ran off.

My sister was cleaning up and I guess she found one but I had not seen it. She left a note on my door saying “Hello, please contain your hairballs ok? :)”

So I put a massive hairball in a sandwich bag and taped it to her door saying

“I contained it :), Love, —-“

She jokingly screamed but laughed about it

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/JohnGalt314 on 2024-12-30 19:30:54+00:00.

I own and run a residential / light commercial HVAC contracting company. We have a customer, we'll call him Tom, that contacted us for a residential breakdown. Tom told us that he had a home warranty and we informed him that their repayment policy is often different than our billing rates and that, regardless of their payment, he would be individually responsible for the full amount of the bill. The repair was a smallish fix for just $228. Bear in mind that home warranty companies are notoriously stingy with payments, if they pay at all. We won't work directly with them for this reason.

Sure enough, the home warranty company paid only $153 of the invoice, leaving a balance due of $75. Tom wasn't happy about having to pay this bill, so he began paying us $1 per week automatically by check through his online banking platform. Neither I nor my bookkeeper were exactly excited by this (because it takes the same amount of her time to process a $1 check as it does a $1,000 check); but we decided to take our lumps.

Here we are now exactly 76 weeks later, and Mr. Tom has accidentally paid us $1 too much -- so he put a stop payment on the final $1 check. I actually made it a point to look up the stop check payment policy from his bank and saw that he would have had to pay $35 to do this. I honestly have nothing but respect for this amount of spite.

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/armaniemaar on 2024-12-30 09:57:10+00:00.

a coworker once told me, “just send me a picture of the event date, and i’ll add it to my calendar.” fair enough, but it got me thinking: why stop there?

so i built a tool that takes any picture of a date—flyers, notes, receipts, even bad handwriting—and instantly turns it into a calendar entry. no typing, no forgetting.

when i sent it to the coworker, they said, “this is overkill.” i replied, “you’re welcome.” now they use it daily.

sometimes, malicious compliance leads to solutions no one asked for but everyone secretly needed.

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/armaniemaar on 2024-12-30 08:06:09+00:00.

a client kept “forgetting” to pay, so they’d ask me to resend the invoice every week. after the fifth time, i set a reminder to email it daily until they paid. they finally called, yelling, “why are you spamming me?” i said, “just following your instructions.”

*UPDATE: so a lot of you are asking what happened next. after i sent the invoice 14 times, the client finally called me—voice absolutely dripping with indignation—and said, “why are you spamming me?”

i calmly replied, “oh, i thought you needed it resent. just making sure you’ve got it this time.” there was a pause. the kind of pause where you can hear someone’s soul leave their body for a second. then they mumbled something about “getting the check sorted” and hung up.

the best part? they paid that same day. all 14 invoices were marked as “read” in my email tracker within an hour.

moral of the story: sometimes, the squeaky wheel doesn’t just get the grease—it gets paid.

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/lilacbananas23 on 2024-12-30 06:06:50+00:00.

My daughter has a big habit of making messes everywhere she goes. Absolutely zero in the executive function department - it's a pain but I love her all the same.

One day she was in my room with me and had completely destroyed my bed. Comforter in the floor, sheets coming off the corners. I said "I'm going to need you to please make the bed neat before I come back upstairs"

I went downstairs and did whatever I needed to do then headed back up to my room. When I get there I see my bed still looks the way it did when I left except for one thing.

There was a sign on the bed that read "hello! I'm neat!"

She made the bed into a creature called neat. I had to laugh. In the end we fixed the bed together.

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Amethyst_6 on 2024-12-28 14:13:55+00:00.

My grandpa told a story from when he was young and in military (mandatory for men in Finland). The group he was in had been recently reprimanded on how they shouldn't do anything they were not ordered to do. Soon after, they were tasked to clear out an attic, it was a hot summer day, so it was like a badly warmed sauna up there. My grandpa was ordered to go take the trash to the dumpsters, so he went and did exactly that to the letter.

Instead of coming back he sat down near the dumpsters. Couple of hours later the person in command came looking for him and asked why he was there and didn't come back to clean the attic. Grandpa's answer was simple "I was ordered to take the trash to the dumpster, no one told me to come back". He received no punishment and is still smug about it after almost 70 years

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/whiskeyfur on 2024-12-27 19:44:31+00:00.

Going to keep this one short.

Management, when I was in the navy at a joint command, decided I needed to go into more detail on one of my regular reports. This is coming from my chief who said it was coming from the division officer so apologies in advance. (their words)

So I turned what was a 1 page report into a 40 page report. Yes, I did comply with orders. Yes, I did do exactly what I was told.

A day later my chief pulled me into his office and said, "by directive from our superiors I'm to quote 'read you the riot act'." and then proceeded to turn a page over on his desk that only had three words, "The riot act," on it. He read it aloud, then gave me a pen to sign the bottom of the form acknowledging my receipt of "the riot act".

Seems like I wasn't the only one who disliked the order. But, orders are orders!

Direction came a little later specifying what details the officer actually wanted. Turns out there was a legitimate reason for ask, and it wasn't just for page length. The officer just failed to communicate the reason is all. Whoops!

Edit: Why the title MC^2?

My MC ^ the Chief's MC = A very Energetic headache for the officer.