Malicious Compliance

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/redmartally on 2024-03-23 01:07:11.

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I'm sure all of you reading this have to log their work time in one way or another. And I'm sure most of you don't agree with the granularity of said logging.

So, I work in IT. Many years ago I was involved in a big project creating a new platform while maintaining the old one. So, during the week I would spend some time on support tickets. My role was more high level, I would never be the one to actually work on a ticket.

At one point in time, there was a new support coordinator assigned to the client account. The number of tickets was rising and the team couldn't keep up, threatening the new platform. The coordinator needed metrics on the teams performance, so he generated reports from the ticketing and the time logging systems, combined them, and started looking into improvements. Until he came across my logs.

The metrics told him I spend about two hours a week and edit a varying amount of tickets. This looks weird and he couldn't bill the client on tickets I worked on, so he asked me what was going on. I explained that I would look over the list of open tickets, bulk update where needed, and log my time with a remark like "classified tickets". Then I would move on to my other duties. He didn't like that and told me to enter a time log for each separate ticket I work on. I asked him what the minimum time was that he wanted me to log, which turned out to be 15 minutes.

Fast forward a few weeks of me spending an hour a day logging hours (and logging that task too) and creating virtual overtime of about an hour a day. Then the coordinator comes up to me with a request to go through and update the full backlog. I'm fine with that and tell him I'm logging that as a generic task and not per ticket. He tells me no, it must be logged per ticket.

So finally the malicious compliance: I spend about two hours to go over the backlog and make sure everything is in order. Then I spend the rest of the day entering everything into the time logging system. Fun fact: I was the first to reach the system's limits, but found a workaround to log everything. That day, as logged in the time tracking software, I worked for more than 16 hours.

The rest of the week I took it easy, came in late, went home early. I was done for the week and every hour I worked extra would be unpaid, right?

When it came time for the invoicing, the coordinator could not justify the huge amount of hours I logged on the account (my rate was twice that of a tech support) and finally he allowed me to stop logging by the ticket. My productivity went up again, as did my mood.

I did flag the potential problems and drop in productivity to the CTO and CEO, who I reported to directly, but they said to comply anyway. We did laugh about it afterwards and learned a lesson in how not to waste time.

Thank you for reading my story!

TLDR: instructed to log time per support ticket, "worked" 16 hours on a two hour task, client refused to pay.

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/1stDesponder on 2024-03-22 05:10:30.

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When I worked Corrections, I requested for 2 weeks off (I had been there for years and accrued plenty of paid leave), it was given to me as I had done so months in advance for a personal event. The 2 weeks went by (way too quick). I had specifically lined up my 2 week break to lead into my 2 days off at the beginning of the break and at the end so I could maximize my time off.

However, during my normal off days a family emergency came up that was quite serious, so I asked for another 2 days off to handle my situation. I was told my my direct supervisor that there was NO way she was approving that, because we are only allowed to use 84 hours of leave in one continuous block (given our rotating written schedules and 12 hour shifts, this equaled 2 weeks), and she ordered me to come in the next day, or I would recieve a write up.

I didn't argue because I knew she was correct, so I showed up that night and reported for my shift and much to my surprise, my Captain had called out sick, so a relief captain came in to fill her shift. I asked him to give me the next day off after my shift was over. He and I had a rapport given the number of years we've worked with each other previously, and so he looked at the schedule and my leave.

He said, "you know you've got plenty of leave right?"

"Yes, I know. I just need some of it to handle my business tomorrow."

"No, I mean you've got PLENTY of leave to take, and get roster is filled the next two weeks."

"Yeah, I just got off a 2 week vacati"- I stopped because he winked at me. And it finally clicked. We can only take up to 2 weeks off consecutively. Nothing says we can't take off 2 weeks, come in for... Say an hour.. Then go home and take off another 2 weeks. So I did and he signed an the paperwork stating, "It's not my shift. Fuck that bitch."

I handled my emergency literally the next day, it turned out to NOT be as serious as we thought, and then enjoyed another paid 2 weeks off from work. It was great.

To add to the bliss, I reported back from work to find out that this captain was fired and replaced for some kind of negligence or something. It was a great month.

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/ErnestlyFreaky on 2024-03-22 04:49:09.

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It all goes back to the summer of 2021.

I started working as a biologist at an urban farm, planning and constructing polyculture systems to research food production.

I developed A plan for noxious weed control and started to construct the systems over the course of a two years.

During this time we had some back and forth with the city council, who didn't understand the nature of our agriculturally zoned property.

After several meetings and lots of work over 2 years, we'd finally made a lot of progress and reached an agreement with the city by the summer of 2023.

Part of the agreement was to mow ditches and the small yard of our properties farm house.

I'll remind you the property is zoned as agriculture. So we have no obligation to follow residential ordinances.

About halfway through the summer at the end of July, the city came on to our property and mowed are entire native pasture and what was soon to be an orchard of already planted baby trees..

When we talk to them, they noted ordinances against tall grass and state noxious weed laws as a justification. The later of which is ironic because they interrupted our system of invasive plant control by mowing in a time when we should've been spraying bio herbicide.

So now in order to remove all the invasive plants from my property and comply with all the ordinances. None of which have anything to do with water! I have created a massive urban wetlands.

It's huge, it's beautiful, it's wet. It's compliant to every law and ordinance. It's mine and the city mayor who lives next door to my farm can enjoy it just as much as I enjoy it living five miles away.

So now I have a wetlands to research instead of a prairie, and I love it! ❤️

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/tairyoku31 on 2024-03-22 03:49:40.

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I'm a teacher at a small, new school. We currently have 2 year levels, so our teaching schedules are incredibly light. This means every teacher has at least 1 day where they have no classes, and it's common to take leave on that day. Mine is Friday.

I realized we will move to a 'full' schedule next month, and figured I might as well use some excess leave and applied to take Fridays for the rest of the month off.

Later, I was told my leave was denied because "its not nice that you get to have multiple long weekends when your colleagues don't" and I responded with "so you're saying just because my lesson-free day is on a Friday I don't get to take leave even though the science teachers can take every Tuesday off, language teachers take every Thursday, and so on?" He kind of waffled around that it "doesn't look good" and that I still have to consider a homeroom 'lesson' I have Fridays (which is a student-led activity time. I'm actually not supposed to do anything/intervene, just be present while students handle everything) that "someone else will have to cover". I've always asked gotten my own covers before applying for leave, so HR has never even had to do anything.

Anyway, I told him straight up that I don't mind if they want to deny my leave, but to remember that I'm there because I want to be, not because I need to be. I told him "okay, but just so you know it was a courtesy on my end to use my leave on days with the least impact. So you're essentially telling me you'd rather me take leave on days I miss actual classes, which I have no qualms doing". He kind of mumbled something and then I thanked him and left.

So that Friday I came in, and then the following Monday I called in 'sick', and missed my class. I have about 20 leave days to use over the next ~7 months (not counting school hols) that make up the final year of my contract here, and I plan to use all of them.

I've also told them on a separate occasion that there's literally no downside to me whether or not they approve/deny my leave requests because 80% of the leave I've taken the past 2 years has been unpaid, because I don't care about the money. Once, they denied a 3-day unpaid leave request and I told a colleague, "I can just not show up. What are they gonna do, not pay me? That's literally what I asked for in the first place so either way I get what I want."

They need me more than I need them, as the sole teacher of the most popular elective subject in the school. It's somewhat niche, so it's not easy to just find a replacement. Not to mention I have both qualifications and experience in my subject's industry, so any replacement they do find is probably going to be 'not as good'.

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/JustHavingAMooch on 2024-03-22 03:25:07.

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Hi all! I've been reading this SubReddit for a while now, but never really thought I had anything to share. However, I've just remembered a little story from when I was a kid, and thought it belonged here. Let me know if it doesn't .

English is my first language, but I often make typing errors, and I don't post on Reddit much so I apologise for any formatting errors.

The context: I have an aunt (I'll call her Susan for the sake of this post), and she has a son who I'll call John. John is a very similar age to me, so I would spend a lot of time with John when I was little, and he would spend a lot of time at my parent's house. Susan wasn't married to John's father (let's call him Harry), but they were in a relationship at the time. It wasn't a great relationship though.

All of that is relevant I think, so with that sorted, let's move on to the story.

This story takes place on a day that Susan had been arguing with Harry. They lived together at the time, and she'd left the house to get away from him. She decided to come round to visit my mom to vent, and I was home as well.

While Susan and my mom were talking, the doorbell went. Harry had turned up with John, and they were both outside! Susan quickly ran upstairs to avoid seeing him, and I was told not to let Harry know she was there.

I'm guessing Harry was over because he wanted to know if my mom had heard from Susan, or wanted to drop John off so he could go look for her. I don't really know- I was pretty young at the time and that wasn't what I was thinking about. What I was thinking was that I needed clarification on the rule that I'd just been given.

You can probably see where this is going.

My mom answered the door, and started to speak to Harry. Meanwhile I started tugging at her, trying to get my mom's attention to be able to ask her a question in private. After a little while, with me trying to find a way of whispering to my mom, she eventually says in frustration "Mooch, it's rude to whisper! Anything you want to say, you can say out loud".

At this point, there's nothing I can do, except ask in the raised voice of a child who has been told to speak up: "I know I'm not allowed to tell Harry, but can I tell John his mom's upstairs?"

Cue a stunned silence, in which my mortified mother mentally processes what just happened, and comes to terms with the fact she couldn't even tell me off for doing exactly what she said.

Harry, bless him, tried to pretend he hadn't heard anything (even if it was painfully obvious that he must have heard), and left shortly after. John stayed, and saw Susan. Susan later went back home, and I'm guessing she argued with Harry some more (they really weren't great for each other).

And as for my mom? I don't think she ever really lived it down- I think she still catches her breath when she remembers how awkward that moment was.

And she never told me not to whisper again.

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Expensive__Support on 2024-03-21 18:50:08.

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The city I live in has extremely inflated vehicle values compared to the surrounding areas. If you buy the same car from a neighboring state, you can often save $3-4k without really trying. When I buy a new vehicle (which happens every 3-4 years), I always look in the surrounding states to compare pricing.

This story happened about 5 years ago – and the malicious compliance is still ongoing to this day.

I was shopping for a new car (brand new) – and found one that matched my specs about 12 hours away in a neighboring state. It was priced about $5,000 below comps.

After looking up flights, there was a 1 way direct flight that took me to their local airport for around $175. Plus the gas to drive back – I was looking at a total of maybe $275 to save $5,000. Absolutely worth it in this situation.

I reached out to the dealership – negotiated a bit – and agreed on a price. I let them know that I would be flying in to pick up the car – and offered to pay in full in advance of the flight. They told me that all they needed was a $1k deposit – and that the car was considered mine.

We signed a contract and I paid the deposit.

And then I booked the flight (for 3 days from then).

First sign of things gone awry:

When I showed up at the airport, the dealership was supposed to pick me up. This had been arranged in advance. A quick phone call later – and I grabbed an uber to take me the 20 miles to the dealership with the promise of them covering that cost. No big deal either way.

Second sign of things gone awry:

When I showed up at the dealership, the salesman I had been speaking with asked me if I wanted to walk the lot with him to look at a few cars. Yes, cars. Plural.

Questioning what he meant by that, we walked into the lot to see these “cars” that he was talking about.

Were these some special type of gold inlaid, full self driving, full self flying, amaze-mobiles? No. They were not.

When I point blank asked to see the car that I was buying – the one with VIN XYZ listed in this signed contract with a deposit on it – I was told it was no longer available.

The salesman offered to show me similar cars – which would have been fine were we able to come to similar terms on pricing – but all of these cars outrageously priced (think 2k over MSRP – instead of $5k under MSRP).

(Important note for later: There was never a mention (or any paperwork, signage, etc) of any incentives for giving 5 star reviews.)

Fast forward 2-3 hours.

I am now convinced this dealership never had this specific car on the lot – and that this was 100% a bait and switch gone wrong. The dealership was unwilling to sell me a similar vehicle at a similar price to our negotiated one (we were over $5k apart) – and were unwilling to pay the flight costs for this bait and switch scenario.

A heated discussion ensued between myself and the GM – where he told me to "go ahead and leave a bad review" – but that I wasn’t getting any “free” money from him.

I took an uber to a nearby hotel and booked a flight back home for the next day.

Total cost? Around $750.

Cue malicious compliance:

This dealership had an average Google rating of right around 4.5 stars and around 400 total reviews. Pretty solid for a dealership.

That night, while I was sitting in the hotel room, I had some time to burn. I spent a couple of hours creating new email accounts just so that I could leave multiple reviews for this dealership. All said and done, I had left around twenty 1 star reviews over the course of that night – and then sort of stopped caring about the reviews. At this point my focus shifted to recovering my lost travel expenses.

A few days after getting back, I sent the dealership a demand letter for $750, which they promptly ignored. Since we had done the original contract (with the deposit) in both states, I was allowed to file a small claims suit in my state – which I did. The dealership never showed up to court – and I received a default judgement for $750. (I did collect that, by the way. It took a few certified letters – a few phone calls – and about a year – but I did get a check for $750.)

As you can imagine, I was still not a happy camper.

What they had done was wrong on so many levels.

All of my friends knew the story of how I was bait and switched – and the fact that I flew to the dealership on a one way ticket only made it that much worse. They had all left a bad review or two – but nothing more than a normal mad customer.

Cue malicious compliance (long term):

I don’t know how it started – or how it ended up lasting as long as it has – but at some point I had some time on my hands and left a bad review for this dealership.

Just one. Not two. Not three. One.

In doing so, I noticed that all of the reviews I had left right after leaving the dealership were gone. Probably taken down for being “fake” or because I had left so many at the same time and the dealership reported them.

I wanted to make sure this dealership wouldn't do this to someone else. So the next day, I checked to make sure that one bad review I had just left was still there.

It was – and since I was thinking about it, I went ahead and created another account – and left another 1 star review.

Fast forward 2-3 years.

It has now become a habit. Every time I have a few minutes to spare, I create a new account and leave a 1 star review for this dealership.

Their current rating? 1.9 stars with nearly 3.5k total reviews.

I am personally responsible for at least half of those reviews.

When you open the dealer’s website, one of the large banners that flashes across the screen advertises $50 for a 5 star review – something about showing the review to your salesman to get a $50 visa gift card. It has been this way since about a year after this bait and switch occurred - right around the time the 1 star reviews began to accumulate.

Assuming I am responsible for half of their reviews – and the fact that the dealership only has 3.5k total reviews – they have paid $50 per review for at least 1,000 reviews (likely more than that).

Meaning, they have implemented a policy to pay for reviews – have spent $50k doing so – and have still seen their average rating drop consistently since telling me to “go ahead and leave a bad review.”

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Massive-Discount845 on 2024-03-21 12:51:12.

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I'm from Germany. We are a very litigious society, so much so that businesses can sue individuals for writing bad reviews. In fact, per German law, it's up to the individual to provide evidence that what they wrote actually happened, or else the individual can be forced to take down the review and pay legal costs to the business.

I'm a tradesmen and did some renovation work for a church in a small town. The church did not pay me. I take 50% upfront and the church had cheated me out of the second half after I had completed the job.

The church only had one other review. I wrote a review stating that I had been cheated by the church. I promptly got a legal letter from the church demanding to take it down unless I wanted to be brought to court. The church could easily argue that they paid me in cash and I would be out of luck according to German law.

Okay. I complied with their demand.

I took down the review and posted a new one stating that I'm a tradesmen and the church threatened to sue me for writing a simple review. I also attached the legal letter from the church as an image in the review.

Fast forward a few months, I received an angry call from the clergyman. He said my review had caused several tradesmen to either ghost him or ask him for complete payment upfront. He claimed that I had 'cost them thousands' and that I would 'burn in hell for hindering God’s work.' I then asked him, 'What is your religion’s founder's view on honesty, compassion and forgiveness?

Cue a moment of radio silence, followed by him hanging up the phone. No legal letter yet, anyhow I can now substantiate my review.

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/YouMessedUp12 on 2024-03-21 04:45:20.

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Buckle up. This is a long one. Obligatory on mobile, English is my first language so all typos are my fault. No TLDR because fuck that. I spent the time to write all this out so you can read it or move on.

I worked for this tech company for almost 7 years. It was my first job out of college. Great company, huge growth, great benefits and most importantly an incredible boss.

The Boss was super helpful and responsive, always had the team’s back, goes out of his way to not micromanage, didn’t care as long as the work got done, borderline forced people to take PTO (we have unlimited and I averaged 30-40 days off a year) and believed in giving good workers big raises and promotions (last 3 years I got 9%, 13% and a promotion and 7% raises).

We worked remote through Covid and I asked to change my contract to fully remote so I could leave the HCOL city where the office was based to go back to my hometown. Boss approved the change and when HR tried to do a COL adjustment to my salary, boss told them no because I’ll be doing the same work in my new location.

The boss was so good that on our team of 16 people the lowest tenured was 3.5 years. I’d been offered several other jobs with salary increases throughout the years but could never bring myself to leave.

Myself and one other person on my team had specialized into working on very complex and involved projects. These were significantly different than the team’s normal day to day work. We’d been doing the complex projects for 4+ years and were the knowledge base for the company in that area. Boss left that area completely to us to manage. As the volume picked up we added and trained 2 more people to our little sub-team to help out. None of these projects went out to the customers without one of us 4 being involved. Super complex ($100ks to millions lost if a mistake was made) And since it was the fastest growing part of the business by far, we were super busy.

Now around 2 years ago. Boss’s boss gets promoted from his VP role up to an SVP spot. And hires a new VP. This new VP comes in and tries to change a lot very quickly. Tries to make everything a trackable metric…. Even where it really doesn’t make sense. I.E tracking the number of “projects” each person on my team did every month. Counted as 1 even if it was super complex and took 2 weeks or if it was very simple with an existing customer and took an hour. Wanted each project to go out faster (even if they weren’t due for a week we were supposed to get them out in under 3 days). Tried to force my boss to assign work to the team instead of us all picking up from a central queue as we could. Ect ect.

Boss pushed back as much as possible but was getting shit on constantly by new VP because the useless metrics VP wanted us tracked by did not meet his super unrealistic expectations. Despite my Boss’s team being the most experienced and efficient in the company and doing significantly more volume and more complex work than any other team.

About 9 months ago Boss had enough of just getting consistently shit on by VP and took a new job and left. (Boss had been with the company for 13 years and was one of the first few 100 employees) My whole team was devastated. We all instantly started lobbying for the most tenured person on our team to get promoted into that roll as she would have the same philosophy as the Boss that just left.

VP interviews most tenured, and a bunch of external candidates. And goes with someone from his previous company. Now this lady will be referred to as Bitch Boss from here on out for soon to be obvious reasons.

She came in and completely destroyed the team from top to bottom. Changed processes that had been perfected for years, did not listen or care about what anyone else had to say. Started micromanaging to the extreme. Team morale dropped like a rock. It took less than a month for the team’s output to crater due to all of her changes. The team from the best in the company to the worst.

It took Bitch Boss about 2 months to get to my smaller sub-team and try to rework our processes. Bitch Boss started micromanaging projects (having no idea what she’s doing) and causing all kinds of issues and delays. She started getting on us 4 about our “metrics” being the worst on the team. Despite us working on the super complex projects that took 10-100 times longer on average than most of the work the rest of the team did.

Bitch Boss told us that if we didn’t meet the expected Metrics we would be put on PIPs. So we decided to comply and focused all of our efforts on simple projects to meet the metric (X number of projects completed per month per person) and left the complex ones sitting in the queue.

This caused CHAOS as my small sub-team suddenly stopped picking up complex projects And just focused on completing simple projects to get our metrics up. Very quickly the sales team is freaking out because deals are getting delayed and their huge commission checks from the complex projects are being put in jeopardy.

When they came to us to ask when we were going to complete the complex projects we all gave the same response, “Bitch Boss has told us we have to focus all of our efforts on meeting Metric X so we will only be doing that. Unfortunately that means we can no longer complete the complex projects. Please contact Bitch Boss for help getting them completed” This did not go over well with her or VP as he started to get complaints as well.

They called a meeting and told us we had to go back to doing the complex projects. We refused as that made it impossible to meet the metrics they created to measure our performance. They refused to drop the metric but still insisted we work on the complex ones as we were the only ones with the knowledge. We still refused. This resulted in a lot more complaints from sales until the SVP got involved. The SVP was the one who created the complex sub-team to begin with and sided with us against the VP and Bitch Boss. He said we were not to be measured by the metrics and can go back to managing the complex stuff without fear of being put on a PIP. So we did.

At this point the other 3 people on the sub-team had seen the writing on the wall and were all actively applying and trying to leave ASAP. They were all office based in the HCOL area still. Bitch Boss changed the team from come in 1-2 days a week as needed to mandatory 3 days in the office (most company policy would let her). So they got a lot more of her BS than I did remote.

I had not been applying because I was distracted, my old boss had approved 2 weeks of vacation for my wedding/honeymoon before he left. This happened to occur about 3 months after bitch boss started. And about a month after the whole PIP blowup. Bitch Boss was PISSED at how we showed her up in front of the SVP and was doing everything she could to make our life miserable.

In that month, the other super experienced guy and my best friend on the sub-team got a new job and left (no notice) and one of the other guys on the sub-team has put in his notice and only had a week left. We were already slammed and still behind from the PIP fiasco so losing half the sub-team just made that worse. Plus with morale so low we didn’t bother to put in any extra effort anymore. In fact the whole team was significantly behind as 6 of the 16 people had left or were on their notice periods at that point.

So Bitch Boss decided that she was canceling my already approved wedding leave because of how far the team was behind. She told me over Zoom. I told her there was no chance I’m missing my wedding and honeymoon for work and I’m taking the full leave and it’s up to her if she wants to lose another person from the sub-team for 2 weeks or permanently. She BSed, yelled and threatened until I just left the zoom call.

She followed up with an email officially notifying me my leave was canceled and if I didn’t show up it would be considered job abandonment. I called her bluff and replied CCing VP and SVP and some other sales VPs who I worked with regularly, explaining the situation (it’s my wedding honeymoon) and that I appreciated the opportunity but was quitting immediately with no notice due to the disrespect from Bitch Boss.

I got slack messages from SVP and several of the sales VPs almost immediately asking me not to quit. The email chain itself blew up with complaints about how my team was mismanaged by Bitch Boss and how now more complex deals were going to get lost because I wouldn’t be there at all to work on them ect.. SVP eventually shut it down but it was a fun read.

I didn’t reply to the slack messages or do any work the rest of that day. Just turned everything off and went to a bar and had a good time. I woke up the next day late in the morning, and very hungover, to a few voicemails on my phone from SVP asking me to call him.

I called back in the early afternoon and talked to the SVP. He was very understanding, asked me to come back. Listened to all my complaints and eventually made an offer. Basically if I came back and worked the rest of the week and tried to train a few team members to work on complex stuff to cover while I was gone, he would give me a $3000 wedding bonus, I would get my full PTO, and when I got back Bitch Boss would leave me alone and let me manage the complex stuff and pick 2 more people to permanently train back onto the sub-team to back-fill what we had lost.

I accep...

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Dangerous-Role-3652 on 2024-03-21 02:16:56.

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I was hired to replace a retiring dispatcher at a local trucking company. He was expected to train me for his job but over the three months before his retirement he refused to do any training with me. As a result, I created my own dispatching software; which sent updates to all my drivers, connected drivers to the shop, coordinated maintenance schedules, and managed all messaging between my drivers and the office.

Once I was on my own I struggled to build clientele and many of our customers left because I didn't know they existed. The only feedback I got from the main office was that I was costing them money. I asked for help and it was refused. During this time the while trucking industry was taking a hit and work was very hard to find. I tried to contact a load broker but the office refused to pay for brokerage fees.

A year goes by and the software I created is really making a difference. The shop is happy and the drivers feel like they are being heard; but loads are still hard to find. Christmas rolls around and at the Christmas party I'm presented with many gifts, the CEO has some wonderful things to say about me and I leave there feeling pretty good.

The very next Monday I'm called into the CEO's office and he tells me I'm done. It's two weeks before Christmas so they'll pay me to the end of the month, "But today is your last day". I lose all my benefits, retirement plan, and health coverage on the spot. Merry Christmas.

So I'm not feeling great. Cue malicious compliance, part of my severance is giving them access to all the software I've written. Fine, here you go. However, it doesn't work if you can't access the cloud, and the cloud is on my private email. It's really to bad I had to clean it up. It seems all the data is gone and the software is useless. Merry Christmas

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Gobbernt on 2024-03-19 15:39:25.

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A friend of mine used to bring his personal laptop to school with him to take notes during class. It was an old beefy Toshiba, and the fans were a touch loud. Not to mention, he had one of the fastest typing speeds I knew of, so we're talking fully automatic key caps here.

To give some credit he was loud, but none of the students were really bothered by it and it's not like he wasn't doing his coursework. The teacher however, decided it was a "distraction" to other students, and that he'd have to leave his laptop at home from now on and take notes "the old fashioned way." My friend obliged, and was very understanding to the teacher.

The next day my friend showed up to class with his trusty electric typewriter, which he restored himself. If the laptop was loud before, this thing was practically screaming! When it was plugged in it always made a low buzzing noise, and those key caps! My God they were like gunshots! He was sent to the principals office for disturbing class, but he brought his typewriter to school for a few days after so we could mess with it in the lunchroom.

I think he was allowed to bring his laptop back, but simply because the teacher didn't have the right to restrict it in the first place. He never had a problem taking notes in that class for the rest of the year...

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/SheZowRaisedByWolves on 2024-03-19 05:42:20.

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My department heads recently suggested that employees shadow doctors in the department in order to learn more about workflow and reasoning in treatment/care/diagnosis. However, they put it entirely on the staff to set up when they would come in and shadow. Any attempts to get the higher ups to work with us on setting up a schedule fell on deaf ears and the resolution we got was to come in on an off day to volunteer (uhhhh no). Well, I had double nightshift OT coming up with a lot of off days afterwards, so I decided to shadow on my last shift. I ended up shadowing for most of a full-day shift before getting checked off to go home. Later in the week, I get a call from the department manager in shambles that I did that much OT. When I told them it was never made clear if we were to clock out or not for shadowing, and that emails never got answered, I said I couldn’t be blamed. The conversation ended quickly and later, a schedule was set up so that employees could shadow on their shift.

TL;DR: Required to do continuing education even on an off day, decided to be a cowboy for an obese paycheck.

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/pittedcherries on 2024-03-19 01:47:48.

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At my job, my boss had a peculiar insistence on having all reports printed out and physically filed in a cabinet. Despite our office having a well-established digital filing system that made accessing and storing documents a breeze, he was adamant that physical copies were the way to go.

So, I dutifully complied with his request. I spent countless hours printing out reports, hole-punching them, and meticulously organizing them in the filing cabinet. The cabinet quickly filled up with stacks of paper, taking up valuable office space and making it difficult to locate specific documents.

Months passed, and my boss finally realized the absurdity and inefficiency of his mandate. He sheepishly admitted that he had not considered the environmental impact or the wasted time and resources involved in his paper-pushing obsession. From then on, we embraced the digital filing system wholeheartedly, and I never had to hole-punch a report again. My malicious compliance had finally paid off.

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Zealousideal_Ad_7045 on 2024-03-19 01:38:07.

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Worked for a big company in record retention department years ago Lots of microfilm and starting to image documents electronically. Due to restructuring butt hat of a supervisor who couldn’t even operate a photocopier took over our one shift the company didn’t eliminate. The older 25+ year employees I learned my job from retired, moved on or got let go. Because of this I was the only one who knew the nuances of the job. I had two huge binders with all the notes and cheats on how to find stuff. Things like if computer says file is in drawer 2A13 under the date, look in drawer B7008 instead. When I gave my notice I said to the supervisor I’ll be glad to sit down with him and go through the book and point out a few important things. He never did. Right before I left I said I have my binders are you sure you don’t want to take a few minutes today? No he said we have SOP (standard operating procedures) for guidance. I could get rid of the binders. So I did I shredded them. A few months after I left he calls me. I already knew what he wanted because a ex coworker already called me. He was panicking because a few big contracts were requesting old files. And they were having trouble where did I put the cheat binder mentioned in that SOP he was trying to figure out. I laughed and said YOU told me to get rid of them. You have SOP. He then asked if I could return as a contractor I said sure $500 a hour when I was making $12. They didn’t go for it. Instead they lost millions and moved the files to corporate instead of a satellite office. Supervisor was let go. They were going to close that department anyway but excelerated it. Everyone transferred to different departments or got nice severance.

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Ask_Angi on 2024-03-18 15:04:00.

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I had a baby in early February and the plan originally was to put him on my BF's VA insurance but apparently we can't do that because he's a veteran and veteran insurance doesn't allow dependents. Weird but okay we'll add him to mine. I messaged our HRD and they informed me they would need a copy of his birth certificate within 30 days of his birth. The problem with that is we can't even request a copy of the birth certificate until 4 weeks after he's born and then we have to wait for the copy to come in the mail. I asked HRD if the affidavit of parentage form would suffice since it's notarized and they said no so I asked what happens if I don't get the birth certificate within 30 days and they advised we would have to wait until open enrollment which has already passed for this year. So basically my newborn would have no insurance for almost a year and we would have to pay thousands for his birth and appointments.

I was doing some research and apparently my son qualifies for medicaid because I was on pregnancy medicaid and I never would have known had my HRD not denied my request. So now his insurance is free and my employer is out over $200 a month. I've been getting emails from HRD asking if we got the birth certificate yet even though it's passed the 30 days. 🤷🏻‍♀️ Too late. Thanks for not caring about your employees at all

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/FetzerRayne on 2024-03-17 13:45:07.

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So I worked security for a major military contractor at one point. Our supervisor liked using our 'random' search number as a tool for punishment for perceived grievances with us. Normally, our search number was something around 15-25. Meaning we would only pull over and search every 15th car, and every contractor truck. It was very cold, and very miserable in the mornings when we would suddenly have a couple hundred employees and contractors show up between 0500-0800.

This day, our supervisor got upset because when he came in at 0400 for his day shift. He was the 15th car. Deciding that he must now ruin everyone else's day, even though we did our best to search his vehicle promptly, but completely, so he couldn't say we weren't doing the searches completely. So he set the day shift search number to 3. So we complied.

There was only enough room for 3 cars/trucks to be pulled over at once, and once that was done, we would usually stop searches until the others were completed, keeping traffic moving. Not today. This time, we filled the search area, and then stopped traffic until all 3 vehicles were cleared, then allow two cars through, pull over the third, allow two, pull third, allow two, pull third, stop all traffic and start searches.

We ended up with a line of cars waiting to get into the plant that went 2 miles long. It got so long the local police got involved up the road as people were blocking traffic in some intersections. Then came the phone call from a 3 star general that stuck in that said traffic a mile up the road. Suddenly, we were called to cease all searches for the morning.

I later heard that it had been too little too late to cancel the ridiculous searches, and our major military contractor lost a billion dollar contract out of the deal. And that supervisor was initially going to be fired, but negotiated his way to just being busted down to a regular guard. We were union, so he started lowest on the seniority chart, and got stuck working all the mandatory overtime, and all the worst posts, including the one he had made miserable that morning.

Edit: I should have noted that two weeks later, said contract was renegotiated after the company I worked for explained that the person responsible for the general's limousine being held up in traffic for almost an hour had been "reassigned". No innocent jobs were lost in the making of this MC.

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/AriFeblowitzVFX on 2024-03-17 08:52:48.

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My Art teacher in college told me to redo my portfolio from scratch because my lines weren't clean enough, it was work we did over the course of months and we only had like a week to turn it in.

Fortunately we could hand it in Digitally, so I just went into photoshop and cleaned up the lines there without redoing anything.

He gave me an A and told me he couldn't believe I actually managed to do it.

(Lesson learned? Nobody cares how you get there, as long as you get there)

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Tazwegian63 on 2024-03-15 05:09:27.

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Not sure if this is exactly MC but here goes.

A few years back I was the IT Contracts and Supplier manager at a large company, been there 25+ years and had a LOT of corporate knowledge, having worked in multiple roles over that time. Also was very well paid due to length of tenure and experience at the company.

A new a’hole boss gets hired and proceeds to get rid of people he doesn’t like and hires his buddies into various roles. The workplace culture took a nosedive pretty quickly. I knew my time was limited as I wasn’t in his inner circle.

Seeing the writing on the wall, I started looking for and applying for other roles. The a’hole boss gets me in their sights and decides to get rid of me, looking to move one of his recently hired buddies to my specialised role (he doesn’t even understand what I do, needing a lot of technical knowledge combined with contract and legal).

He tells me he wants to move me onto an upcoming project and to finish off what I am currently working on and not take on any new work. Through all my contacts across the company, I knew there was no new project or even significant budget for one, but I’ll do what I’m told. I wrap up my work and tell him I’m ready for the project. He says sit tight, it’s not far away, and ‘don’t start anything else’. So I sit at my desk, applying for other jobs and waiting.

One of the jobs I applied for comes through and get an offer on a Friday morning. That same afternoon the a’hole boss comes around and says, the project isn’t happening, and as you have nothing else on your plate, we will have to let you go.

Yahtzee!

I know there is heaps of work backed up and the shit is going to hit the fan soon when contracts aren’t renewed, services cancelled, etc. I also know my employment contract and they will have to pay a generous redundancy - because the boss told HR my role isn’t required anymore.

I say, ok, I guess you will have to pay me a redundancy too? Sure he says, not knowing what he has agreed to. So I go through the redundancy process and at the same time accept the offer of the new job. Come my last day, I happily accept the $200k payout (his face goes pale when he hears of the amount, because it comes out of the teams budget), walk out the door and into the new job the day after.

Love my new job, less stress, great culture, a great team, wish I’d left earlier, but then I wouldn’t have got the payout if I resigned.

4 weeks later, I hear the shit is hitting the fan, and they advertise for a new person for my old role as noone knows what to do, because apparently my job was ‘easy’. He didn’t even ask me document what I did to hand over to anyone else.

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Timothy_Jor on 2024-03-14 12:08:37.

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This is a story from my time in my country's army. (This could also easily be in the u/pettyrevenge thread)

After I joined the army for my mandatory 9 month service, I was forcibly given the "specialty" of the cook. After some surprisingly harsh training, they sent me to an outpost where I had to do 2 daily services (one as a cook and one as an area observer, while everyone else did 1 to 0 services) for about 50 days non-stop. That meant I was on my feet from 6am to 2:30am every single day, while getting 3,5 hours of sleep every night. Nobody helped me in any way, I did not have nearly enough time to prepare the food properly (they claimed it was not protocol to help the cook) and nobody cared, so naturally I got extremely tired and pissed off.

One day I dared to protest my situation and also report some problems with the kitchen, lack of supplies and the oven itself, and was told to shut up, stop complaining and do my job. So I decided to comply with the "shut up and don't complain" policy. What they didn't know was that I had found a trick to turn the oven on, it looked fine but the food wouldn't cook at all.

The next day I was going to prepare a stuffed vegetables dish for 12 people, tomatoes and peppers stuffed with rice and minced meat. I put it in the oven and waited for 4 hours to (not) be cooked. I casually served the raw food which had become mushy and rancid because it was summertime.

The look on everyone's face when they tried to eat the first bite was absolutely priceless. They immediately snapped and started freaking out, yelling and screaming in anger like this was a common thing, even though I had never failed a dish before and those arrogant selfish pricks ate like kings every day. I maliciously smiled and told them that I lacked half of my supplies and the recipe was wildly incomplete, while the oven was "malfunctioning". Word reached the captain who also freaked out but I told him that it was he who commanded me to shut up about the food problems. He said my failure should be reported and I agreed. I immediately called my unit and reported that I was being mistreated, overworked, sleepless and ignored for 43 consecutive days, so this resulted to my failure. The next day I heard the captain was reprimanded severely by our colonel commander for the shitty situation in his outpost.

Of course the next 3 days I did the exact same thing, and I starved the bastards to insanity. Afterwards they were BEGGING me to help me out with the food preparations, but I refused since I complied with "it's not protocol to help the cook" policy which they claimed in the first place, and kept feeding them disgusting tasteless food under the excuse of a broken oven. They called the unit and cried that I am holding them hostage with the food and I should be removed. The day I was removed 1 week later was the best day of my life.

I haven't regretted anything and 100% would do it again.

TLDR: I starved an entire military outpost for almost a week under the false pretence of a broken oven because they royally screwed me over for months.

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Fun-Pin9061 on 2024-03-14 06:42:13.

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So, this happened a while back, but the memory still brings a smirk to my face whenever I think about it.

I used to work for a company where the boss had this habit of demanding that we stay late, even when there was absolutely no work left to be done. It was one of those toxic environments where productivity was measured by the hours you spent at your desk rather than the actual output of your work.

One day, after wrapping up all my tasks well before the end of the day, my boss came over and told me that I needed to stay late because "that's just how things are done around here." Mind you, there was literally nothing left for me to do.

Now, instead of arguing or trying to reason with him, I decided to play along with his ridiculous demand for overtime pay.

I nodded, grabbed a book I had been meaning to read, and settled back into my chair. For the next two hours, I sat at my desk, flipping through pages, occasionally pretending to jot down notes, and looking as busy as possible.

At the end of those two hours, my boss came by to check on me, expecting to see me toiling away at some imaginary task. Instead, he found me reading a novel.

He looked puzzled and asked, "What are you doing?"

With a straight face, I replied, "Well, you asked me to stay late, so I figured I might as well put in some overtime. This book has been on my reading list for a while."

Needless to say, my boss was speechless. He couldn't really argue with me since he had asked me to stay late, and I was technically still on the clock.

From that day forward, he never asked me to stay late unless there was actual work to be done. Malicious compliance at its finest.

TL;DR: Boss demanded I stay late for no reason, so I decided to put in overtime by reading a book at my desk.

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Worldly-Leg-74 on 2024-03-13 22:13:04.

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At my first job decades ago, as the junior employee on the IT staff for a school, I was in charge of setting up email addresses for new teachers.

The district had Microsoft Exchange for email and the education policy was that all teacher email addresses would follow the same format, first initial then last name, unless we had another teacher of the same name (which never happened, because we only had ~400 teachers in the district.)

However, we did have a new teacher - Greg Roper - who I decided to just set up as simply "roperg".

Once all the new usernames were set up, my boss, our bureaucratic assistant principal, reviewed them all and sent me a short note, telling me to fix Greg's username to comply with the school's standard format. Well I didn't see the note until my next work day, and by that time principal's assistant had left for a vacation to Hawaii. Facing a deadline to publish all the emails for the school website, and back-to-school email, I went ahead and followed orders.

Username changed to "groper", email set to groper@washingtonunified.org*. Pushed to production.

And everything was quiet for about a week. But then students began to receive their welcome emails, directing them to contact their teachers using the newly assigned email addresses.

Next thing I knew, I got an urgent, slightly flustered call from the principal himself. I printed off that email directive from the assistant principal, and went up to the principal's office, where I found both of them sitting side-by-side. Apparently, several concerned parents had already contacted the school, questioning the appropriateness of the teacher's email address. The assistant principal, still tan from his vacation, started to low-key chastise me for not catching this sooner.

Well his sunburned face turned even redder from embarrassment when I plopped down the email thread from a week earlier, where he explicitly asked to make Greg's email comply with school policy! The principal's expression was priceless.

The assistant principal left with his tail between his legs, and I had a new email, "roperg," created for the teacher that afternoon. Greg was so grateful that he actually took me to lunch, joking that it was the least he could do after the crazy ordeal.

*school name changed to protect privacy

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/audi_dudi on 2024-03-11 20:52:24.

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Working as an auto tech in a woman owned repair shop, I was once asked to explain the problem with a female customer's car to them. I am pretty good at explaining things with out using jargon, and usually had no problems doing this. But not with this customer. I started to explain what was going on, but she decided that I was out to bamboozle her. She shoved her hand, palm out, to within an inch of my face and stated loudly "STOP!" I did so, and she said in a very arch tone " I want you to tell me, in 10 words or less, what is wrong with my car."

I shrugged, and said "It's broken. Repairs will cost seven hundred dollars." and walked away.

She followed, saying" I guess I need more information than that." I replied "That is what I was trying to provide, before you so rudely inturrupted me. Now if you will excuse me, I have other work to do." Then I refused to respond to her in any way.

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/FunkySplashMonkey on 2024-03-10 22:54:12.

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Some of you might recall that financial crisis that happened a bit back, circa 2008-ish.

At the time, I was working in a call center for retirement accounts such as 401k's or 403b's. For any non-Americans, these are plans from your employer where you can contribute a portion of your salary, and usually they will also contribute something as well, to save for retirement. This is probably the biggest way that Americans save for the end. As the account-holder, you have control over how the money is invested. Usually from a small selection of different mutual funds.

Also, about the call center... I had some experience, I knew what I was talking about and was able to speak with confidence in my voice. Therefor, I was on the "escalated" line. This is reserved for the people who "want to talk to a manager." I was not a manager, but I and others like me got these calls. In some rare cases, we actually fixed a problem, but more often than not, just told the customer the same thing they had just heard from the first rep, only with that level of confidence. Then they hung up as a happy customer. We also had the ability to review previous calls to the center.

So, one day in April of 2009, an irate client was transferred to me. He had just gotten his quarterly financial statement, showing that he was invested in several different funds that were affected by the stock market. His complaint was that he had called a month earlier to request that his stock-market based investments be moved to something more stable and less risky (at that time, the news was all doom-and-gloom, leading people to make majorly ill-informed financial decisions). This didn't happen. As I reviewed the transaction history on his account, I confirmed that whoever he had spoken to previously had only redirected new contributions into stable funds, but had made no change to any existing balance.

I told the gentleman that I could review the call, and if our rep had made a mistake, adhere to his wishes. I then tried to say something else... but was quickly cut-off. "Yes, review that call. I want my money out of the market!!!" I try to say something like "okay, but sir...." only to be cut-off again. This was not a man with a small account balance, at the time it was 500k+, meaning that at the beginning of the crisis, he probably had around 1 mil in his account.

I reviewed the call. And yes, our rep had made a mistake. I went through the process to retroactively conduct his requested transactions. The rep got a negative mark on his record for making a mistake, but the customer really got the short end.

For those that don't know, the low-point in the market was in early March of that year. Many stocks and markets rebounded enormously and very quickly. What I wanted to tell the guy was something like "fund A is up 28% since the day you made that call. Fund B is up 32%.... " and so on. But, as he didn't give me the chance to tell him to think about his request... well, that is why I am posting here. As my company had to backdate his transactions, he instantly lost about 150K in his account, and missed out on the boom.

Of course, he called later to complain. But, even after our mistake, we had done exactly as he had asked.

I hope he is enjoying his retirement.

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Comprehensive-Ice406 on 2024-03-10 21:01:35.

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This isn't my story but my friend's.

My Friend worked at a Jewelry Store, and the attire was a business suit. She loves her job because she is surrounded every day by precious metals and stones, she's a nerd for victorian fashion or whatever esques there is regarding fashion, balls, princesses, and royalty of europe.

Anyways, the only thing she hates in that job was the manager, Suzie. From the account of my friend, Suzie has an attitude similar to the fairy godmother from shrek, very kind infront of customers but would then bare her teeth when they left. Her favorite past time was to chat with a customer while 'critisizing' the employees with remarks about their looks, appearance, or how what accessories they wore didn't match their complexion and such, and she seems to have a grudge for my friend, prolly because she engages with the customer with minor trivia like "did you know jade has a hidden meaning" and such, and it made a lot of people return to the store.

One Day, Suzie came in extremely pissed and started off on my friend about how she looks(mind that she dresses as plainly as possible because she geeks out when it comes to anything fashion related to the 14th century) and that she has to look like what the customer wants to look like. I imagined that a lightbulb went off on her head and blood rushing to her face as she thought things she could wear and whatnot. So for the entire week, which crosses Valentine's Day, she dressed up in gowns and dresses matched with accessories that made her look like a Barbie princess. The entire time, there were people coming up to her about the dress, the accessories, and the theme to which she explained with delight.

Suzie was steaming the entire time, she tried to get her fired but the owner was present because of the upcoming holiday and was happy with the increase in sales then. I managed to sneak by and saw her in a white dress that screamed "Frozen" if it had an eastern vibe to it, and Suzie glaring from the back.

I heard she left after the week was over without notice and someone else was promoted, my friend wasn't too bothered because the current manager had seniority and was pretty chill so she's happy.

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Away_Location on 2024-03-10 19:21:43.

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Been working at this job for some years when I got a new manager. A month or so into her working there, she came into my office and told me I wasn't allowed to work overtime anymore and if I have any issues, we can discuss it. The way she said it sounded like she was expecting this to really hurt me. I sent an email to confirm the conversation we had and her response basically said, "Correct, no more time theft!"

I didn't really like that accusation. I usually stayed a little late by 30 minutes at most to finish up projects. A lot of projects come in last minute and other managers were thankful for my help. So I quit staying to finish projects and wouldn't start a new one if there wasn't enough time. No real issues but some projects started falling through the cracks. I let the other managers know my manager told me no more overtime and I'm just following orders.

Fast forward barely a month later. As I'm leaving for the day, she rushes to me asking if I can work on, you guessed it, a last minute project. It's potentially worth millions! I explained how I've got plans and I'm not about to be a thief.

Next day was too quiet. In the afternoon, I get a request to have a meeting with my manager and HR. Usually you get a written complaint beforehand so I'm still a little off guard. I could at least be a little prepared. At the meeting, my manager reads off grievances like it's an intervention. She frames it like I have antisocial behavioral issues, insubordinate, and I don't go the extra mile. If you let her keep going, I wouldn't be surprised if I was somehow to blame for the company not reaching it's goals.

When she finally finished (she had to have started writing that the night before and into the next day), I asked if it's okay if I had my say. I pointed out a lot was just her opinion and I'm overall well liked. I always do exactly what she says. However, my manager likes to constantly move projects around while I'm working on them and I'm not allowed overtime. She denies ever saying this so I forward the email to HR. My manager then starts backtracking she didn't mean it permanently.

HR takes me off the call a bit. When they come back, it's just HR and I start by saying I'm not signing anything. They tell me let's agree to disagree, this has been one big miscommunication, and they appreciate all the work I do. I asked to confirm if this was going to be held against me in any way and they said no. They went on to say if I can stay late sometimes, great but it's also okay that I leave after my 8 hours. My manager later quit in less than a year.

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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Elfarica on 2024-03-10 06:23:03.

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Obligatory "this is my first time posting", "I don't live in America", "no, I'm not using real names", "no, I don't consent for you to use my story in a reading video anywhere", and "English is not my first language, not even my second or third, but I do use it in professional capacity" opening statements.

I was on the other end of a small malicious compliance lately, and I though I'd share. For background: I'm one of two managers for the engineering division in a small consulting company owned by a much bigger state-owned company. The companies are currently in the process of transferring some of the parent company's business lines toward my company, and I am the lead in my company to execute those businesses on the "working level" (read: not a C-level or a Vice President/VP).

It just happened that last week had a lot of meetings scheduled for our team. On the particular day, I had a personal meeting scheduled with the parent company (for an different reason than what's stated above) and, within 30 minutes of that meeting, another big business meeting which includes 4 VPs from different divisions and directorates, my company's C-level, and my team. All were online meeting.

I prepped the talking points already, but my C-level haven't confirmed whether he's gonna join or not. The protocol is usually that I lead the talks when it comes to my company's POV, but as I've mentioned before, I'm in another meeting right now, and it's running a bit late. As a result, I joined the meeting room from my phone.

Phew. It was only me and one of my engineers (and a junior from my uni, so we are quite close) Alex.

I told Alex that, "I think this meeting's gonna end soon. Until I do, please tell me if anyone enters the meeting room. I might have to greet the Parent Company VPs until our C-level enters the room."

Half a minute later, that *ding dong* from Zoom chimes. Alex told me, "Yeah, Jane from our team joined." I looked at him incredulously, and he just shot me with a mischievous grin. He knew what he was doing.

*ding dong* "Oh, Dave from our team joined."

*ding dong* "Oh, Melissa from our team joined."

"Alright, I get it. What I meant was, if someone from the Parent Company joined."

"Okay, will do."

And then 5 minutes later my current meeting ended, I transferred the meeting to my laptop, and then...

*ding dong* Alex headed to my desk, saw my computer, and then said, "That's Emma from Parent Company."

"Yes Alex. I can see it. Now you don't need to report any entrance to this meeting," I said with an annoyed smile, because we knew what he was doing.

"If that's what you want." Still with the widest grin on his face, like he's proud with himself.

The meeting went well, I lead my team well, and we discussed a lot of jargony business jargons. But that malicious compliance from my junior did lighten the mood in my office.