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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Theory_Large on 2025-08-27 17:07:38+00:00.
Long, sorry. TL;DR at the bottom. This was about twenty years ago, so some of the dialogue won't be exact, but some of it is burned into my memory.
At the time I was working in a toy shop, and it was coming up to Christmas, so you can imagine how busy we were. No, busier than that. Each worker was given a specific section of the store to keep tidy and stocked - mine at the time was what we called Boys' Toys, all the action figures and so on. However, I was also the only person other than managers who could process refunds, exchanges and so on, and because Boys' Toys was right beside the tills and the managers could be anywhere (no radios), the cashiers got into the habit of calling me for help. And it being nearly Christmas, there were a *lot* of exchanges, refunds and other things needing my intervention.
Our store was franchised, and we had a district manager (D, because he was kind of a D and also his name starts with D) who had never worked the floor a day in his life, he had some kind of business degree. He visited a few weeks before Christmas, came into Boys' Toys an hour or so before closing and got mad because it was messy and there were some gaps in the shelves. He refused to listen to my attempted explanations and stormed off.
Next morning, he was right there at opening time. When we had our pre-start meeting where sections were assigned, he interrupted our manager to say "I'm putting myself with OP today, she clearly doesn't know how to handle the section so I'm going to show her what's what." There was an awkward silence for a moment before Manager went on with assignments. I kept perfectly silent.
D trailed me to Boys' Toys and looked around. "Well, what's first? Or don't you have a plan?"
"Well, first I usually - oh, sorry, that's the tills calling for help, I'll be back in a minute." Dealt with the tills, returned, got halfway through explaining the first job and was called away again. By the time I got back it was fifteen minutes into shift and he hadn't done any work yet.
I have to give it to him, he stuck with it all day - I finally managed to show him what we were doing, and he schlepped up to the stockroom and down to the shelves half a dozen times, tidied the same set of shelves because kids loved throwing things all over the floor, watched as I was called away an average of five times an hour. (I didn't usually keep track, but you bet your ass I did that day.) He took his lunch when I did, ten minutes late because of a refund.
He didn't apologise, of course. I was too lowly for that. But the next morning, at the opening meeting, my manager announced that from now on, Boys Toys would have two staff as a matter of course, and that the managers would make an effort to be more available to the tills.
Tl;dr: District Manager thinks I'm being lazy, arranges to 'show me what to do', realises it's because I'm doing too much of the managers' jobs and not enough of my own.