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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Aggravating_Dot_5217 on 2024-05-21 13:15:33+00:00.
I not sure if this story belong her or in AITA.
Lets start with a bit of background. I work for a very big company but due to my speciality my work is split across the main company and one of the smaller companies. The MD of the main company allows my days to be split in half. The big company is very laid back when it comes to my work. As long as my work is done by the deadline date, they pretty much don’t care what I do during the work week.
In the smaller company I report to the C-suite but the CEO. Lets call the CEO, RA ‘cos the sun doesn’t rise until he gets out of bed. RA is most interested in what I do during the day. If I didn’t know better I’d say that RA thinks that I don’t work but sit around playing computer games all day.
RA send anything 20 – 30 emails to me per day and more than half will be the same question just phrased differently. Each email response is usually anything from 2 – 5 typed pages. I have even had emails sent to me at 11 Pm and at 8:30 the following morning an email asking why I haven’t responded to the previous email. If I am asked the same question multiple times I ignore the majority of the emails and only answer the question once.
When I am working I need to concentrate and most days I close my email client so that I’m not disturbed. Last Monday, I’m working quite happily and I get a WhatsApp from asking me to please read an email and respond post haste (to quote RA). I stop what I am doing as I get the sinking feeling that something bad is about to happen. As per usual there are 30 emails from RA.
The first email starts off by stating “You must always answer emails as quickly as possible as it is unprofessional and shows disrespect to the writer of the email.”
Cue Malicious Compliance
I stop what I am doing and start to respond to each email individually making sure that my answers to the same questions are different. I further indicate that I only work for him half day and will stop my work at exactly the middle of the work day. I spend the next day and a half responding to emails and not doing my work, even though there is a deadline looming for RA and his little company. These days when I walk into the office in the morning RA seems to have spent the entire night responding to the emails and in the process dragging other members of staff into the email trail and the email is getting so complex that I don’t know what’s going on.
Yesterday, I was expected to have finished RA’s work and when asked to present the outcome, I simply said that I had not finished. When asked why, my response was that I was so busy responding to emails I wasn’t able to do the work.
RA lost his mind and started to threaten me with being fired. He said that there was a customer that was waiting for the result of my work. He then asks why was emails put above doing my work and all I did was produce a copy of the email. My Boss from the big company was also present and all she did was laugh.
She then told RA that I will no longer do any work for his company and he must find somebody else.