This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/dlhoff432 on 2025-10-30 15:09:58+00:00.
So I work at Home Depot as a lot associate. My main job duties involve collecting carts from the lot and being on call to help customers load heavy items into their vehicles. Since I’m typically the only lot person scheduled during my shift, this means I’m running back and forth trying to help customers and get carts. It really is a job that needs two people (one on each end of the store), but it’s just me.
Now I can usually handle this, but when I’m assigned other projects on top of that, it’s too much. On one such day, the head cashier (supervisor) who we’ll call Karen (usually a nice lady, but has Karen tendencies as you will see) told me that Kyle (ASM) had such a project for me. He wanted me to clean out an area at the side of the store and move a bunch of carts there. This was going to take at least a couple of hours because the area was such a mess. And since this was during the summer when the store was busier than usual, I would be constantly interrupted with loading calls and trying to maintain the lot.
This is where the malicious compliance comes in. Kyle wanted me to focus on cleaning that area which I did. It ended up taking 5 hours (bear in mind that I also answered several loading calls during that time).
The problem? I didn’t spend any of that time collecting carts so after those 5 hours, the lot was a huge mess of carts scattered about. Karen was not happy about it (as she gets really picky about the lot being free of carts). But I looked her dead in the eye and told her that I was just doing what her and Kyle told me to do.
I then went on lunch while associates from other departments had to round up all the carts. After that, Kyle never asked me to take on other projects.