People Dispense Their Malicious Compliance Revenge Stories

Telling stories is a big part of our conversation with loved ones. We tell stories about embarrassing things that happened to us, achievements we've made, or even gossipy stories about people we might not particularly like. Something else we may tell stories about is the time we got back at somebody for being a jerk. Call it revenge, if you will, because that's usually what it is. In these stories, however, getting back at someone is in the form of malicious compliance. These people maliciously comply to get their sweet, sweet revenge. You may ask, "Is it really revenge if they're doing what they were told to do?" Yes! You'll see how below. Check these stories out, and let our other readers know what you think.

10. I Don't Get Overtime? That's Not What The Law Says

“My cousin worked at an injection molding company as a machine operator, and one of his colleagues was named Danny. He was a runner. He would show up early and start up the machines before the day shift arrived, he would make sure that each machine had enough raw materials and boxes for the completed products, that sort of thing.

He would pull the full skids of the completed product and take them to the warehouse and wrap the skids for shipments. He’d load the trucks, and accept the deliveries of raw materials. He knew everyone on the factory floor and was pretty much a pivot man for the operation.

Let’s call the company CanCo, since it was located in Ontario, Canada. They got bought out by an American company, AmCo, and AmCo sent up a new guy to be Facility Manager.

Before they got bought out in 2019, CanCo was struggling.

Danny was an arrive early/stay late kind of guy, so he offered to bank his overtime and CanCo accepted. He got it in writing.

At the end of 2019, he asked to be paid out for his accumulated overtime, which was substantial.

In January 2020, the Facility Manager called him into the office and offered him a $6K annual bump in pay and increased benefits if he accepted a salaried position for 44 hours a week. Danny took it.

As 2020 went on, Danny was working lots of hours and submitted an Excel sheet every week with the hours he’d actually worked.

There was a column that showed “hours in excess” where he entered the hours in excess of 44 for the week.

In the autumn of 2020, Danny approached the Facility Manager and asked if he wanted Danny to take his accumulated overtime as time off, or to be paid out.

The AmCo company handbook stated that all PTO needed to be used up by the end of the year, or it would be lost.

The Facility Manager chuckled, and replied, “You’re salary. You don’t get overtime. That’s why I put you on salary.”

“That’s not right, Boss.

I get overtime after 44 hours.”

“No, you don’t. That’s AmCo company policy.”

“Yes, I do. That’s Ontario Labour Law.” Danny handed him a printout of the relevant page from the Ontario Government website.

The Facility Manager said he would look into it, but didn’t.

Danny pestered him, and finally, fed up, he fired off an email to the Facility Manager, the Plant Manager, CanCo HR….and AmCo HR as well.

Eventually, he got called into a meeting with the Plant Manager, the Facility Manager, and HR. You should understand that HR was a bit of a Karen, nobody really liked her, but she was a blabbermouth.

The company tried everything to get out of paying the overtime.

Danny asked, “Do I have the authority to enter into contracts on behalf of the company?”

“No.”

“Do I have the authority to assign work to my colleagues, or discipline them?”

“No.”

“Then I am not a Manager or a Supervisor, and under Ontario Labour law these are the only people exempt from overtime.

Oh, and see that total? You can multiply that by 1.5, so for every hour of overtime I worked, you either pay me an hour and a half or give me an hour and a half off, with pay.”

After the meeting, the Facility Manager was furious.

His little scheme to get free work out of Danny didn’t play, and now he looked really bad in front of his boss.

“Danny, beginning right now, you don’t work another minute of overtime without my permission, you got that?”

“Okay,” Danny replied.

“Let me put that in an email.” He did, and the FM confirmed it in a reply.

Danny was arriving at 5:30 am, more than an hour ahead of the Production team, in order to unlock the doors, turn on the lights, and warm up the machines.

These machines melt little beads of plastic and squirt them into molds, so they take about 45 minutes to an hour to warm up.

So the next day, at 2:30, Danny left and shut off his phone. There was an afternoon shift that started at 3 pm, and a meeting with the day shift foremen, the afternoon shift foremen, the FM, and Danny, and there was a discussion of any issues and production targets for the shift.

Since Danny wasn’t there, and he had the tally sheets, the afternoon shift had no idea what they were expected to produce for the shift.

The next day, Danny came in early as usual, and when the FM arrived, he demanded to know why Danny didn’t attend the meeting.

Danny explained that his shift was over, and he went home since he wasn’t allowed overtime. That’s why he shut off his phone, too, he can’t do company work on his off hours, that’s overtime.

The FM said that Danny’s attendance at the meeting was mandatory, so Danny suggested that the only way for that to happen would be to adjust his working hours.

The FM then changed his hours to 8 am-4:30 pm, effective immediately, and put it in an email, at Danny’s insistence. Later that day, there was a delivery that arrived at 3 pm, and Danny wasn’t there to unload it, so they had to turn it away and have them return in the morning.

The next day, Danny arrives at 8 am, as instructed, only to be met by a furious Day Shift Foreman. When the Foreman arrived, the entire production staff was in the parking lot as the doors were locked. He opened up, let them in, and then had to wait around for almost an hour, producing nothing, as the heating coils on the machines came up to temperature.

The FM arrived in the middle of this bollocking, and Danny simply pointed at him and said, “He changed my hours to an 8 am start, didn’t he tell you?” This turned the wrath onto the FM, who now had to take responsibility for a 12-15% drop in production for the day.

There were also occasional Saturdays when the company fell behind, and only Danny wouldn’t be there to bring the machine’s raw materials or take away the finished product. That would turn into a cluster crap, too.

So the FM gave in and gave Danny blanket authorization to work any overtime required.

The raise he got to bump his salary ended up boosting his pay by $2.75/hr, but the only downside was that Danny couldn’t bank it, it was paid out each check.

The kicker? Remember Karen, the blabbermouth from HR? Somehow, and nobody knows exactly how, word got around the office that ANYONE who wasn’t a manager was entitled to OT, and they all started submitting time sheets that included it.”

Another User Comments:

“I live in Ontario and I’ve had bosses from America try to pull this before.

Not to me, mind you, because I work the hours I’m scheduled and that’s it. But I’ve known Dannys before and whenever an American higher-up tried to screw with them they always said the same thing: “pay me my OT or I’ll see you in court, win, and make off with three times as much!” And they always got their OT. Always.” semiTnuP

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9. Go Home And Think About Whether I Want To Keep Working Here? I've Already Made Up My Mind

Pexels

“Nearly two years ago I started work at Company as their digital marketing person. After I started, it turned out that I was brought in to put out the fires left by my predecessor, the VP of Marketing, who had a team of 4 plus himself, spent over $1 million in one year, and brought in 5 deals, 2 of them for under $10K.

As you can well imagine, after a performance like that, I had lots of work to do, and very little to do it with. Aside from 1 or 2 paid tools, everything else was to be done using free tools only.

I’m gonna do some bragging here, I beat the previous year’s figures in all categories with 10% of the budget.

When I started, I thought Bossman (Founder/CEO) had a really good management style, saying things like: “Your successes are yours, your mistakes are mine”, and “The enemy of good is great.

I don’t expect perfection, I want you to make sure things work and get them done”. In essence, I was allowed to run my own (one-man) department and outsourced freelancers, and as long as I was getting results, he left me alone.

Since I was the only person on the marketing team, I also had to learn a large number of skills and platforms that weren’t directly related to digital marketing.

Not to say everything was perfect, but things were pretty good. One of the main things that weren’t perfect was that Bossman had serious anger management issues.

As I said before, he left me alone but I saw him blow up at and fire other people for stupid crap. He lost it at me too once or twice, but he’d calm down after a couple of hours and things would be back to normal.

If it looks like an abusive relationship, that’s because looking back, that’s exactly what it was.

As the year came to an end, I approached Boss and initiated a performance review. I ran him through everything I had done in the past year, and he was pretty surprised at how much I had done with so little.

I asked him for a raise, pointing out that I was currently making 8,000/month in local currency (average is 4,500/month) when people with my (now augmented) skill set were making between 13-14,000/month. I asked him for 12,000. He said he’d get back to me, and never did.

Every time I asked him about my raise, he had another excuse. After the last excuse, I began looking for something else.

The other day we had a meeting, and it turns out that two months ago I made a mistake. It wasn’t a critical mistake, and it was rectified within a few hours of discovering the mistake.

No harm or damage was caused whatsoever to Company, but Bossman flipping LOST IT. I mean slamming on tables, yelling for the whole office to hear, what have you. Then he said the magic words: “Pack your things up and go home.

Think about whether you want to keep working here”. So that’s what I did, and 10 seconds later I said “No, I don’t”.

I started packing my crap up while he turned an even deeper shade of red and got even louder.

I didn’t answer him at all, just kept on packing up my things and saying goodbye to my colleagues. Turns out that being ignored really pushed his buttons, to the point where he started threatening to call security to have me removed, while I was actively removing myself and my things from the office.

Here’s the part where it gets beautiful: My country is very strict on employee rights (sorry, Americans, I feel your pain). His words and behavior are considered an improper dismissal. By law, he’s required to give me 30 days’ notice of dismissal, which he didn’t.

When he realized his mistake, he convened a pre-dismissal hearing, but it was already too late, he’s opened himself up to a lawsuit, which I’m already talking with lawyers about.

Because by law he has to give me those 30 days’ notice even though he already fired me, for the next 30 days I’m eligible for ALL the benefits and social rights in my salary, but I can do jack all for him and there’s nothing he can do to me without making the incoming lawsuit 10 times worse.

I’ve already got 4 interviews lined up for next week, paying almost double what Boss was paying me, and best of all, I’ll be interviewing for other places on his dime. The cherry on top is that because I’m the only marketing person, without me, nothing happens in the marketing department for the next month, and if he doesn’t hire someone on in time, I won’t be around to answer any questions the new person might have.”

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8. You're Not Okay With Lateness But Fine With Absences? Count Me Absent, Then

“So to set the stage: I graduated high school in 2013 and my senior year was…a challenge. My sister passed away, my health took a nosedive thanks to chronic illnesses that were progressively getting worse, I crashed and totaled a car (not my fault, but not a fun experience nonetheless), and I had two concussions…you get the idea.

The first half of the year tardies skyrocketed among the student body. The school changed the student parking areas and basically made it so that any students who drove themselves and any students who used the door closest to that parking lot were caught in a huge bottleneck and any one student goofing off could potentially keep literally hundreds of students from entering the building.

It was ridiculous. Additionally, they decreased the between-class passing period from 7 minutes to 5 minutes. Mind you, if you were to walk from one end of the school to the other when the halls were completely empty it would take you AT LEAST 5 minutes.

Add 1200 other people to the mix and even 7 minutes was a time crunch.

So tardies increased. A lot. And the administration got it in their heads that the best way to remedy this situation is to implement new punishments for being late to class.

Prior to this year, after 5 tardies you had to attend an after-school detention with the teacher of whatever class you had missed. That’s it. If you skipped class, unexcused by a parent or doctor, 5 times, you received an in-school suspension.

And if you missed more than 20 days of a class, excused or not, you had to repeat the class. (There were some exceptions to that, but they were basically catastrophe exceptions.)

The new rules were ridiculous. If you were tardy to a class 3 times, you received a suspension.

If you skipped the class altogether, UNEXCUSED, you received a suspension. All it took was ONCE! If you received 3 suspensions, you had to retake the class. But, if an absence was excused then there were no consequences. Oh, and they got rid of the 20-day absence/repeat rule.

So, on to the fun.

I was just burnt out by the end of that first semester. I was stressed and upset and dealing with horrible panic attacks after my sister’s death. My body constantly hurt thanks to undiagnosed pain conditions and I couldn’t stay awake in class to save my life.

I was just over-dealing with bullcrap. I spent the entire first semester running from class to class because my classes were clear across the school from each other. I lived less than 6 miles from the school but was leaving over an hour before school started because of all the road construction going on between my house and the school.

There was no way out of my subdivision that didn’t involve a mile or more of closed lanes, plus there was construction on the road leading to the only entrance to the student parking lot. It was bullcrap.

I was a bit too tightly wound at the time.

I was a straight-A student, in all the AP classes I could fit into my schedule, and I had never, EVER, been late to class. So being late to a couple of classes that first semester was extremely upsetting, but I still hadn’t even managed to warrant a detention.

The end of the first semester rolls around and we’re all given a letter notifying us and our parents of the attendance change. Except they didn’t include the change to the 20 absence/repeat rule. It just….wasn’t there at all. They were hoping by not including it in the letter, the change would be overlooked.

It was not. (Mwahaha)

So second semester rolls around and my class schedule was changed because of human error and I get thrown into a weightlifting class that I would not have signed up for if you paid me to. I was so mad.

I was tired and in pain and you had better believe lifting heavy objects for an hour a day 4 days a week was NOT my idea of a good time. (The weekly swimming day didn’t suck, though.) And then more construction showed up on my route(s) to school.

And I was late. Very late. As in arrived to school midway through SECOND period.

So I’m in the office, in tears, being written up with a suspension thanks to city-wide road construction and the attendance secretary and counselor who oversaw these matters are showing no mercy or leniency.

I’m handed the write-up to sign and a copy of the attendance policy. In full. And lo and behold, the change to the 20 absence/repeat is on there. As is the word “unexcused.” As in “all unexcused absences will result in a one-day suspension.”

Do you see it? Do you see the loophole?

I cackled.

I flat-out cackled. Pulled out my cell phone, called my mom, and said, “Hey. I’ll explain later, but I need you to call the school and excuse me from first and second period. Thank you, love you, bye!” And before I could even slide my phone back into my pocket, the attendance line rings.

To say the secretary and counselor were angry would be an understatement. But I wasn’t done yet. After gleefully shredding the write-up. I asked if this copy of the attendance policy was mine to keep and proceeded to highlight the word “unexcused” and the change to the 20-day absence/repeat policy.

I then turned to the counselor (C).

Me: “So, I want to be sure I understand this correctly. If I show up late three times I get suspended?”

C: “Correct.” (Said very snobbishly.)

Me: “If I ditch class I get suspended?”

C: “Correct.” (Said as he crossed his arms like he was trying to be extra intimidating.)

Me: “But if I get my mom to call or write me a note excusing me from class there are no repercussions?”

C: “Correct.” (You could see him trying to work out if he still had the upper hand.) “But good luck getting a parent to agree to that.”

Me: “And it doesn’t matter at all how many days I miss? The 20-day absence/repeat rule has been eliminated in full with no replacement?”

And that’s when he understood the loophole I’d found.

I kid you not, watching that man crumple as he came to the conclusion that I found a way around the suspensions was the best “fall of man” I’ve ever seen. He uncrossed his arms and seemed to deflate straight onto a chair.

C: “Correct.”

Me: “Wonderful! Thank you for your time. I’ve got some time before third period so I’m gonna go hit the vending machines, bye!”

And off I went. Strolled into third period with pretzels and a soda, happy as a clam.

That night my mom wrote me roughly 50 notes that read: “I excuse OP from -blank- period(s).

If you have any questions, please give me a call at -work number-. Signed, OP’s mom.” And she repeated writing out those notes a month or so later.

I skipped EVERYTHING. Gonna be cutting close to make it to first period? Skip it.

Hit Starbucks instead. Don’t wanna go to that freaking weightlifting class? Don’t. Take a 90-minute lunch instead! Overslept? Well, get some breakfast on the way to third period, but then skip that awful weightlifting class and come back for fifth and sixth periods.

Need more time to study for a test or finish a project? Skip the morning altogether and only come in for that math test. Go home after second period to get ahead on that project.

That weightlifting class? After the first few weeks, I attended the swimming days and the game days (soccer or dodgeball) nothing else.

Think about that. One, maybe two days a week. For the whole semester. If I attended 30 classes total I’d be surprised.

And of course, they called my mom to verify the notes and she flat-out told them she had supplied me with fill-in-the-blank notes and she would gladly verify them all as legitimate.

The sheer amount of times I hit Starbucks at 9 am on a school day was astounding. And it was done on purpose. I was flaunting that I had skipped classes. Every time I walked into that office with a Starbucks cup and a note I saw a little glimmer of fury in the secretary’s eyes.

If the counselor was there, he’d lean against a wall and glare, but he couldn’t do anything to stop me.

Our district had a strict policy change policy. Which meant that any changes to things like attendance policies and dress codes had to be implemented at the start of a semester and had to remain in place for the duration of the semester.

That counselor tried to appeal to the school board to change the policy at every single meeting that semester. I attended the first one. One of the school board members lost his crap laughing at the situation. He asked, “what idiot wrote this policy?” And that counselor turned beet red.

They basically told him that he’d made this mess, he could deal with the fallout. They returned to the previous attendance policy the following school year. But, as I was a senior, that didn’t matter to me.

Naturally, I told others of my discovery.

And soon enough everyone was exploiting this loophole. Of course, some parents wouldn’t excuse their kids, but enough would. We all showed up on count day, though!

My grades stayed at their previous level and my mental and physical health improved as I was no longer running myself into the ground.

All I know is that without that loophole I would have run myself into the ground and probably ended up in the hospital. That loophole saved my life. And after all, all I did was ask my mother to excuse my absences. It’s not my fault I was allowed more than 20.”

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Mistweave 1 year ago
I wrote my own notes the second semester of senior year after I turned 18. They just about died in the office when I wrote one in front of them excusing myself lol.
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7. There's A Lack Of Maintenance Going On? I'll Make Sure To Become Obsessed With It

“Some years ago, I got a job tankering a barge. A barge is basically a floating container that gets towed around port to port. ‘Tankering’ means to load it with fuel (or whatever product you carry) and discharge it in another port.

There were two other tankermen, but we worked 4 weeks on, 2 weeks home. So in my 4 weeks, I’d work 2 weeks with one of the other tankermen, 2 weeks with the other. I was pretty new to tankering, but I’d been working on boats for a few years and enjoyed it.

There was little I liked more than getting on a ratty, rusty boat and chipping rust and painting until the boat was looking sharp, but I WAS a novice tankerman. And this boat was NOT looking sharp. Rust everywhere, storerooms a mess, dirty inside & out.

The 2 other tankermen were of the opinion they were ‘tankermen only’, meaning they did nothing but tanker the barge, despite their job titles being ‘Deckhand/Tankerman’. They felt chipping/painting was beneath them and did no other work. Both of them were from down south, one a Cajun (I’ll call Gumbo) and a black guy from Mobile (I’ll call Darnell).

From my first trip, they both took a dislike to me. Darnell mostly because he was lazy, and just wanted to hang out on the stern and fish. Once I started busting butt around the ship, he knew he had to start doing something, and he didn’t like that.

Gumbo, however, REALLY hated me. He considered himself ‘Barge Captain’ (a title that didn’t exist except in his mind) and saw me as a threat to his imaginary throne by (GASP!) improving things. It wasn’t just the boat. I got all the old load plans out of the places they were cramming them, organized them by ‘fuel amount’ and put them in a binder.

That way, when the customer said ‘Please load 68,840 Barrels for us”, I would flip to the closest previous load to that amount, and we would see how much to put in each tank to match the amount. As a result, loads started getting closer and closer to the ‘requested amount,’ making the customer happy.

Gumbo & Darnell tended to just ‘wing it’, but being new, I was a little strict about doing it properly. When I am in unfamiliar territory, I tend to be strict to the point of OCD to make sure I get it right.

Also, I really really did NOT want an oil spill on my watch.

This went on for months, me getting more and more comfortable with tankering, and annoying the other 2 by organizing storerooms, cleaning/organizing lockers, and generally making the boat a better place – Heck, I was even cooking! Strangely, there weren’t too many accolades coming my way, and thanks to the Assistant Engineer (A/E) ‘Jim Bob’, I found out why.

You see, when Big Boss would come, it would tend to be when I was home. Gumbo & Darnell were bad-mouthing me behind my back, harping on my ‘lack of experience’, magnifying small errors, and ‘concern trolling’ that they were just trying to ‘be safe.’ Even worse, all the changes I made, they took credit for.

It wasn’t ‘OP cleaned out the paint locker’, it was ‘we got the paint locker cleaned out’. Jim Bob often worked extra hitches and was a witness to everything. Jim Bob was a good guy, but from a poor town in Louisiana, dropped out of high school at 15, and was functionally illiterate.

His illiteracy kept him from advancing, and as he was the only crew member to befriend me, I helped him out with his job, showing him all kinds of tips to streamline things, like putting an excel spreadsheet on his work computer that allowed him to quickly track and monitor fuel/lube use.

After a while, he began relaying to me what was happening behind my back. His exact words, “You and I are like brothers, so I say to you as a brother – they’re out to get you.” I kind of figured this was going on, as they had both begun to play the passive-aggressive game we in the industry call ‘playing crap-crap’.

So I knew I was the odd man out.

About this time, one of the barges pumps went out, and the first thing the mechanic said was it was due to ‘lack of maintenance’, meaning ‘tankermen weren’t lubing, oiling, or greasing the pumps.’ At crew change, Big Boss came down to chew us all out, and like a fool, I said I had no idea we were supposed to do these things.

Naturally, 100% of the blame came down on me for this, and my response was humility, asking what needed to be done. Big Boss made out a ‘Maintenance Plan’ that the pumps would be serviced every 2 weeks – to be done the tankerman returning, with a log of the work done to be completed.

After what Jim Bob told me, I decided to adhere to compliance to the point of obsession. I would know those pumps so well, I could teach a course on them.

As I had just returned that day, I did every check/measurement/fluid level twice and logged it all.

I asked Jim Bob what kind of grease and how many squirts to use. I counted the squirts and logged them. He had all the grease, so I had to get it from him. I logged all of my maintenance in the ‘Logbook’.

Not only that, Jim Bob had all the grease in the Engine Room. So I had to get it from him. I logged that too – 1 tube Marine Grade #2345 whatever. Jim Bob and I also went over the pump with a fine-toothed comb and found EVERY ONE of the grease points.

I added that list to the ‘maintenance log’.

Funnily, I noticed that whenever I came back, the logbook (which was really just a handful of pages set aside in a crappy notebook we kept in the crew area) hadn’t been updated since I’d left.

It occurred to me I was the whipping boy – Gumbo/Darnell really thought they had me where they wanted me, and didn’t do crap all on the barge.

Months later, one of the other barges had a minor fire (due to overheating) about 3 days before I was supposed to arrive.

The company hired a 3rd party to check all maintenance fleetwide, and ours didn’t do well. Big Boss came down (with notes!!!) to ensure we were following the protocol he laid down. Big Boss asked if we’d been doing the required maintenance.

At this point, I’d been screwed by these guys for over a year and had calmly practiced my response to any question. When Big Boss asked if we’d been following the protocol, I replied that I did it within a day of my arrival, every 6 weeks.

Darnell mentioned that the ‘pumps were so dry when HE arrived, it looks like they ain’t been greased in months’. I replied that I could guarantee they’d been greased at least once every 6 weeks, as I was the one that greased them.

Then Darnell made the mistake of saying something that set the whole situation aflame.

“OK, Well if you say you been doing maintenance, OK….they just look to me like they’re starved for oil.”

Me: “I get them the day I get back every time.

I even log my work. Do you?”

Darnell: “Log it where? Where do you log it?”

Intoxicated Butt Capt: “I ain’t never got a request to log anything.”

Me: “In the Maintenance Log Big Boss Requested months ago!”

Gumbo/Darnell: “What? What log is that?”

The Logbook tended to be ignored by the other two, and usually, when I got back, it was buried under newspapers and XXX mags.

I walked up to the tray underneath the TV and pulled it out. I casually flipped to the ‘Maintenance Log’ “Section” and showed them the places I had logged the work I’d done. As an added bonus, I actually ‘started an entry’ for the next guy, so all he had to do was fill in the numbers.

Stuff like:

‘Name:__________’

‘Date Serviced____’

‘Hours Run_______’

‘Oil Amt Added____’

‘Filters Changed Y/N_’

Naturally, it was all blank. As an added bonus, I had made sure to ‘not wash my hands’ before log entries, so I couldn’t be accused of ‘pencil-whipping’ due to the greasy fingerprints.

I sat quietly while Big Boss, Gumbo, Darnell, and the Capt read the Mantainence Log, consisting of my entries, and my entries only.

Jim Bob and I just watched each other, expressionless. Both Gumbo & Darnell tried to cover for each other, claiming ‘they’d seen the other doing the required maintenance’, but Big Boss was no dummy.

“Where’d you get the grease and filters from? I see no record of transfer from the Engine Room to the barge.”

Darnell said, “Well, we get the grease from Jim Bob all the time.

I’ve asked for at least 4, 5 tubes, ain’t I, Jim Bob?”

All eyes are on Jim Bob. Jim Bob did the most amazing thing. Scowling at Darnell, he stood up, threw his coffee cup in the trash, and walked the 20 feet to his cabin.

The slamming of the door was like a judge’s gavel coming down.

I took the dark path.

“Big Boss, I am sorry for any problems. After what happened in April, I have been obsessed with ensuring the pumps were properly maintained on my watch.

I am happy to show you where all 17 grease points are and my routine for servicing them. I know the pumps backward and forward at this point.”

“OP, that won’t be necessary. I’ve seen all I need to.” He snapped the Logbook shut and told the Captain “We’ll talk later,” and disembarked the vessel without another word.

Gumbo got transferred to the ‘punishment boat’ (the worst boat/barge in the fleet) and got written up for arguing with that Captain on his first gosh darn hitch, last I heard. We got a new Tankerman (bizarrely, a cousin of Darnell’s), but I was pretty confident at this point and took the lead in training him.

Darnell was an ‘always be on the winning team’ kind of guy and let me take the lead. We wound up with a pretty good crew, hard-working, hard-partying, just how I like it.

When they hired a new Captain, he was a guy that had come up with Big Boss (which is why he got the job), and he told Big Boss “You know OP is about the only guy worth a crap on here.”

I still have the Eval he wrote for me – it’s on my darn Linked In page.”

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6. Want Me To Do Something I'm Not Paid To Do? Sorry, I'm Not A Manager

“I work for a contractor doing custodial work for a casino. To preface this, I took this job mainly because it did not involve management in any way (I have worked in management most of my career and was just burnt out).

When I started this job I was made aware by the recruiter/assistant (who I will call Amy (she’s lovely)) that a lot of the people that worked at the site only spoke Spanish and that there may be some difficulties with communication from time to time.

This wasn’t a problem for me as Amy spoke English and was currently managing the contract because the actual contract manager was on medical leave due to having surgery. I am the kind of person that works very hard mainly because I take pride in my work ethic.

As soon as I started I downloaded Duolingo (an app that is used to teach foreign languages) and began to learn as much Spanish as I could so I could better communicate with my coworkers. I am still learning but know enough to understand my coworkers most of the time.

Most of my coworkers are….lazy. They are often times on their phones while on the casino floor, huddled in groups, or hiding in the locker rooms to avoid doing the work. I, on the other hand, have regularly gotten compliments from the company we are in a contract with about my work ethic, so much so that the president himself has sent emails to my company to show his gratitude for my hard work (as well as giving me some free merchandise with the company’s logo).

Here’s where the story gets more interesting…

We are ridiculously short-staffed. On a regular shift, we are supposed to have 10 custodians working (cleaning the machines, the bathrooms, keeping trash off the casino floors, taking out trash, mopping the bar and restaurant, restocking all the supplies, etc).

Often times we will have 5 people on a shift or less, and with my coworkers being fairly lazy, that means a lot of stuff doesn’t get done. I am regularly doing most of the shifts workload by myself, as well as picking up the slack for the other shifts because they too are extremely short-staffed.

The actual contract manager finally comes back from medical leave about 3 months into my working there. We will call her Sally. At first, Sally and I get along great. She thanks me for my work ethic and for everything I have been doing.

All of that changes when I asked for 3 days off. (We had been working mandatory overtime and up until then I was there for nearly 60 hours every week because we were short-staffed). Initially, Sally agrees to my time off request (I filled out the paperwork and made copies for myself just in case (managerial background….)) A week before the days I requested come up and she puts out the schedule and my time off wasn’t applied.

I approach Sally and ask her why, and she says that someone else put in for time off. (This other person is the LAZIEST of all of my coworkers and regularly acts as a supervisor because she’s worked there the longest and is the only person that can understand a little bit of English).

I tell Sally that I think this is extremely unfair considering that I put in my time off request over 2 months ago and had made sure that no one else had asked for the same days beforehand. Sally explains that she doesn’t have any paperwork to prove that, so I give her my copy which I had placed in my work bag.

This is when Sally decides to show her true colors. “Do you want to do my job? Do you think you can manage this case better than I can? No? I don’t pay you to come in here and argue with me.

You aren’t a manager. You aren’t a supervisor. You are a janitor, that’s it. That’s all I pay you for.”

I keep what Sally said in mind and just keep my head down at work for a few months after this. At this point in my employment, Sally is getting in trouble with the higher-ups for the lack of employees and retention that is occurring at our site, as well as the company we work for not being satisfied with her performance-managing everyone.

It’s not really a secret as we have regional and district management coming in frequently to try and help get people hired and play peacekeepers between Sally and the Casino CEO.

Finally, we are getting new people hired on thanks to a temp agency that was contracted in to help.

A lot of the new hires only speak English….the others only speak Spanish. Other than the lazy coworker who is now on vacation (3 weeks) the only person that can speak/understand both English and Spanish is me.

The morning the new hires arrive, everyone is gathered in the office….including Sally’s boss.

They go through orientation (only speaking English) for the new hires and begin to give everyone their assignments. This is when Sally comes up to me. “OP, I need you to train the new hires today and make sure everyone else is doing what they are supposed to be doing.”

Me: “Does this mean that I’m being made a supervisor?”

Sally, who apparently forgot our previous conversation: “No, but you’re the only one that can speak English and Spanish and so I need you to make sure everyone’s doing what they are scheduled to do.”

Me….with a blank expression: “I’m sorry Sally but I can’t do that.

I’m not a manager. I’m not a supervisor, and I’m not a translator. I’m a janitor….that’s all you pay me for, remember?”

Sally at this point is trembling with rage and starts screaming at me about doing what I am told to do and dropping my attitude, etc.

I looked her dead in the eye, with her supervisor (whom she forgot was behind her) and pulled my resignation out of my bag, handed it to her, and walked out, knowing full well that now they were going to have a lot more issues because their best worker quit, and there was no one that could effectively communicate between the workers and the company we were contracted with.

Skip forward to the next week and I get a phone call from Mr. regional manager “hello, OP, this is Mr. Soandso, I wanted to formally apologize for the behavior of our former employee Ms. Sally. She has been relieved of her position and we would like you to come back to work with us in a supervisory position.”

I am now a supervisor, and they are paying for me to take Spanish lessons, which once I complete I am supposed to get a significant raise.”

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5. Repaint The Islands With The Wrong Paint Color? If You Insist

He warned him about the incorrect paint color, and he wanted him to use it anyway. What an absolute disaster that could have easily been avoided.

“This one I felt kinda bad for because it involved a few injuries, very minor ones luckily.

I didn’t want to do it, but it came down to my job, so I complied. Here is the story.

Years and years ago, back in the early 90s, I worked as a manager at a gas station. We had a great area supervisor who decided to retire, we were all very sad, and even sadder when her replacement came in.

He was a total butt. He had just come out of retiring from the military and felt that with his military experience, he could whip us into shape. One of the things he wanted to be done was make the stations look good, which I’m 100% for, but also do it with as little finances as possible, which was fine if it was the right thing to do.

This time (one of several), it wasn’t.

So around the pumps are these raised islands. The islands are painted on top with a special paint that has a good grit to it, so when it gets wet from rain or whatever, and people stand on them, they don’t slip and fall.

Well, this area supervisor wanted the islands repainted. So he got some paint out of our supply depot and dropped it off at all the stations he ran. No problem, I went around myself and painted the sides of all the islands.

They looked great, but the tops of them were not painted.

So he shows up one day to inspect and sees that the tops aren’t painted. Asks me why. I told him this isn’t the right paint, it has to be the gritty thick paint because we don’t want customers slipping and falling.

He starts yelling at me, tells me he is going to fire me if they aren’t re-painted by the next day, blah blah blah, and says that it’s not my responsibility to worry about the customers it’s his. Total egotistical mindset.

Do as I say, don’t think.

So, I did what he said. I repainted all the tops of the islands that day, a nice warm day in the fall, hadn’t gotten wet yet really. The next day, he shows up, looks around, and has this grin on his face that he “beat me into submission” type thing.

Says something like “See, next time just do what I say, don’t question my judgment.” I just nodded, knowing what was about to come. And dreading it, because I knew that the customer was going to be the victim here, but there was nothing I could do.

A week later we get our first rain. Some of our islands stayed dry under the canopy, but about 1/2 of them got wet because the rain was coming in somewhat sideways. And then it happens. Lady gets out of her car in nice shoes with no grip, steps on the island, slips, and falls.

She’s not really hurt, just a bit of her backside and back, but we call the ambulance anyway. She’s livid. I just tell her to bill the station and give her the address to make a claim against – my area supervisor’s info.

Then it happens 3 more times over the next couple of days. 2 of them were very minor but the customers were also livid but didn’t get an ambulance or go to the hospital, but they also got the contact information of my area manager.

Then #4 happened. Could have been much worse, but this guy was dressed in a SUPER NICE and apparently expensive suit and slipped and fell with the hose in his hand right after taking it out of the car. He twisted his ankle, cue an ambulance, and a few drops of gas got on his clothes.

I again provide my area supervisor’s info. Then the weather dries up and the problem goes away for that week at least.

About 10 days later my area supervisor drives into my station with HIS boss. I had met his boss a couple of times, cool guy, kinda one of these people that doesn’t take nonsense from anybody but is super down to earth and reasonable.

Apparently, the nice suit guy was a lawyer. He has filed a lawsuit against the station for medical bills, pain and suffering, AND the replacement of his super expensive suit. I don’t know what the lawsuit was for, but it was way over 10 grand.

So the area supervisor and his boss come up to me to discuss the situation. I told them that wasn’t the only incident, as I had filed my paperwork as I was supposed to, there was a total of 4 while it was raining.

The “big” boss asked me why this was all of a sudden a problem. I looked at the area supervisor who I could tell on his face was hoping I was going to say something untrue, but nope, I am going to tell it exactly how it was.

I laid it all out. I told him what I was given. I told him that I didn’t paint the tops originally. That I told the area supervisor that it wasn’t the right paint. He told me to do it anyway or lose my job.

I even told him that the area supervisor told me that customer safety wasn’t my responsibility it was his, which is why I gave everyone who got injured the area supervisor’s information.

The “big” boss asked me a couple of questions, then turned to the area supervisor and said something like “OK, I have what I need, let’s go,” and they left.

Surprisingly, the area supervisor kept his job after that but had it out for me (I quit a few months later with no notice for a better job). But he got a huge reaming. Not only that, but his expenses were HUGE that quarter.

He ended up at the bottom of the list (rank-wise) of area supervisors for costs for the quarter.

They ended up having to have crews go to all his stations, strip off the bad paint, and re-paint all of the tops of the islands with the thick gritty paint.

And it had to be done fast before the next rain came in. So huge expense.

All he had to do was get me a can or two (and the other stations) of the gritty paint, and I would have gladly used it.

But because he had an ego and thought he knew best, it cost the company and his area the settlement of the lawsuit, the other injury claim, and the cost of the crews to come out and repaint all the tops.

I’m just glad the injuries were minor.”

Another User Comments:

“I really don’t understand companies that do this. This wasn’t a mistake, it was a willful disregard for the safety of others. He was warned that he was violating company policy and putting others at risk and still chose to act without consulting the other managers.

At the very least, he should have been stripped of responsibility.” grauenwolf

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stargazer228 1 year ago
I'm shocked he wasn't fired for all the trouble he caused.
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4. Make Sure All The Men Get Their Deserved Breaks? Will Do!

Pexels

“Background: I work nights at a small chain grocery store near me. I have a full-time job during the day and head over to this retail job at night and work 6-10 pm as a cashier. Most weeknights it’s extremely slow (I’m talking maybe 2-3 customers per hour after 8 pm), and we were told that as long as there are no customers around or waiting to be cashed out, you can be on your phone.

We always stay close to monitor our lanes and usually will notice anyone walking down and immediately assist them, regardless. All of the names in this have been changed.

So, on a typical Wednesday night, it’s about 8:45 pm and there are only a few customers walking around the store.

We have 3 cashiers (2 female, 1 male), me included, a senior cashier (female), and a customer service manager (also female) on the front, and the stocking staff (who are mostly male) throughout the store restocking the shelves. Most of the time we don’t stand behind our registers waiting for people to walk up, we kind of group up together and chat or lean up against one of the racks and do stuff on our phones.

In this particular scenario, the only male front-end employee was on self-check and was meticulously using scissors to trim the edges of ripped-out coupons (the dude’s got odd hobbies, I don’t judge), while the remaining staff, all female, were either chatting or on their phones (I was reading a book on my phone).

All of a sudden, one of the store managers, Ted, walks over to where most of us are congregated and asks us to come near him. That conversation goes like this:

Ted: Hey guys, we just got a complaint. A customer said that she is tired of coming in here at night and seeing all the women on their phones and screwing around while all the men do the work.

She said that all the female employees ignored her when she had a question and that they should be put to work while the men get to take a break. I explained the store policy about downtime, but she apparently has only seen the female employees on their phones and claimed it’s not a fair policy and should be changed to include ALL male employees.

Me, flabbergasted: What the heck is she talking about? We were told that we’re allowed to have our phones out if there are no people, and nobody’s come up and asked us anything. Most of the store staff aside from the front end is male, so…

Ted: I know, but can you kind of… be discreet? (I begin to ask who she is, but he cuts me off.) I’m not telling you who she is, she wanted to remain anonymous.

Most of us roll our eyes but nod at him; you could tell he didn’t give a rat’s patootie about what she had to say.

Now, while Ted didn’t tell us who this complaining customer was, there were only 2 people in the store at this time, and one was a guy… so process of elimination. Sure enough, 15 minutes later, Karen struts her way down my lane with her nose in the air and a satisfied smirk on her lips, dropping all her groceries on the belt.

I give her the customer service voice and fake smile, but I keep seeing her side-eye my phone where it’s sitting on the counter to my right (where the receipt printer sits). I cash her out, she snatches the receipt, and stomps out, not saying a word but making sure to shoot my other female coworkers dirty looks as she leaves.

She’s a repeat customer, I’ve seen her in there quite a few times during my shifts at night, and I recognize her as the same woman who consistently complains about ONLY female staff (which was confirmed by every female worker I asked after this happened).

Almost every woman that works on the store floor, me included, has had at least one nasty run-in with her, so I turn to my fellow employees and a grin spreads on my face.

It’s on.

Fast forward, about a week later. Monday night.

I’m working my normal 6-10 shift, but this time it’s me, 2 male cashiers, a female senior cashier, and a male front-end manager. All of the stockers are male that night and are in on what I’ve been planning and waiting to execute.

I look up at around 9 pm and I see none other than Karen strutting into the front of the store. It’s go time. The front-end manager hops on the walkie-talkie to all the stocking crew, telling them that “Special K is in the store”.

Immediately, all of the stockers drop whatever they’re doing and pull out their phones, leaning against the shelves while they play around (even the 1 male employee at the deli got his phone out while his female coworker was the only one helping customers).

It takes her a good 20 minutes to make her way through the store (later I find out that she walked through almost every aisle and saw 6 out of 7 stock guys on their phones, including the deli, who all ignored her).

The second she rounds the corner to come up to the front with her purchases, the senior female cashier and I both get to work, heads down and cleaning registers neighboring ones that are open (and trying not to laugh), while the 3 male employees stand in a circle on their phones.

Karen walks down one of the lanes and drops her stuff, but none of my male associates pay her any attention. She clears her throat and turns to Savanna, my co-worker, who is cleaning the lane next to the one she’s standing at, and I can hear her clear as day.

Karen: EXCUSE ME! Can someone ring up my items?

Savanna, in her most exaggerated customer service voice: I’m SO sorry, miss! I’m cleaning like I’m supposed to, one of the guys is on that register.

She points to the group of male employees, who all look up from their phones and blink at her.

Eric, the brave one of the group and who just so happens to be on that register, just smiles at her and says:

“I’ll be right there, we’re taking a much-deserved break.” And looks back down at his phone.

This woman starts stammering and ranting about how this is unacceptable, that the men in this store have always been so helpful.

She demands to see a manager, who also happens to be female that night and in on our plan. Nick, the customer service manager, tells her with a straight face that Emily is currently unloading one of the trucks in the back and can’t leave the merchandise, but he’d be glad to provide her the customer service number if she would like to make a complaint.

She accepts that and he hands her one of the business cards with the number on it.

I give them a cut-off signal and the charade ends, and Eric walks over and begins cashing her out, the same bright smile on his face.

Karen is grumbling under her breath about how abnormally rude the employees have been. When Eric hands her the receipt, he looks her dead in the eyes and goes for the kill shot.

“Well, ma’am, we’re just making sure that ALL of the men get their deserved breaks while the ladies do the work.”

Her face turns red and her expression drops as she quickly grabs her bags and rushes out of the store. I haven’t seen her since and she never called the customer service number to complain.”

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3. Don't Do The Dishes? Fine, Good Luck

“Back in 2019, I did an internship out of state. It was probably one of the best decisions I have ever made in my life. One of the good things about this internship is that housing was provided for anybody participating in the internship.

Some downsides however, included 1) Our roommates were randomized, meaning we were pretty much put in apartments with anybody doing this internship, and 2) the people who run these complexes were EXTREMELY strict on rules. On any given day throughout a majority of the internship, these people would inspect our apartment to make sure it was clean.

Any sort of mess, even if we weren’t the individuals who caused it, were written up. After two write-ups, we would have a meeting with the “head of housing”, and a third time, we would be kicked out of housing, maybe even terminated from the internship! Luckily for me, it never went that far, but we were written up once, and that’s when this story takes place.

I was with five other roommates. The one roommate in this story is Emily. Emily seemed nice at first but ended up being a total witch to me. She despised me for no reason whatsoever. I tried being nice to her and tried doing as much as I could to make her happy, but it was never good enough for her.

One such moment was a week when I had a week off from doing any chores. Our chores system was set up in a way where each week, five of us would do something different and one person would have a week off.

Well, being off from work, I decided to just stay home and relax.

When I went into the kitchen to grab something to eat, however, I noticed dishes stacked up and overflowing in the sink, all dirty and disgusting. I knew this wasn’t good.

The inspectors haven’t been in our apartment in a hot while to inspect the apartment, so I knew they would come in any day to inspect it.

I looked over at the fridge, where our chore chart was, to see who was doing the dishes this week.

Emily. Great… I sighed before deciding to grab the sponge and start scrubbing the dishes. Surely Emily wouldn’t care if I washed the dishes for her. After all, she works just as hard as I do, right? This is one less thing for her to do, right?

That’s what I thought…

But a couple of minutes later, she came into the apartment in a huff and paused as she saw me doing the dishes.

Emily: Excuse me, you know that’s not your job!

Me: The dishes are piled up and really dirty, I thought I would do some.

We might get inspected soon!

Emily: I don’t care! It’s my week to do the dishes, not yours! Hands off!!

I dropped the dish I was working on in the sink and backed away before going back into my room. I was mad at her.

She didn’t need to act like that when I was trying to help her out! But then I thought, now that she was home, she would probably do the dishes herself. After all, she said that was her job, right?

Well, I went back out there and back into the kitchen to grab some food again and she was nowhere to be seen.

She and I share a room, and she never went in there, so she must have gone out again. That’s what she usually does when she’s not working.

I stared at the pile of dishes, the urge to clean them was REAL.

But I thought back to what she said, it was her week to clean it, not mine. So, my malicious compliance kicked in and I started making my lunch, adding one more plate to the pile in the sink before going back to my room.

Later that afternoon, I heard a knock on the door.

“INSPECTION!”

Oh boy… here we go…

I headed out of my room and went up to the front of the apartment. I greeted them and let them inside, where they immediately started inspecting EVERYTHING.

Like I said, they meant business.

One of the inspectors immediately paused as she came into the kitchen and saw the mess of plates in the sink. She gave me a stern look.

Inspector: Care to explain to me why the dishes are like that?

Me, casually: Well, I tried to clean the dishes earlier, but another roommate, Emily Lastname, got mad at me for what’s supposed to be her job.

The inspector wrote that all down. I knew this meant we would all most likely get in trouble, but it felt so satisfying knowing that this would come back and bite Emily in the butt.

The inspector continued looking through the kitchen, finding nothing else wrong, and the other inspector came out finding nothing wrong as well.

The dishes were the only problem. Despite that, the inspectors still gave us a slip with our room number on it that said we had failed inspection and that we would be written up before leaving.

Later on that night, my other roommates returned home, noticing the write-up slip.

They started panicking, and some of them got mad at me for not doing the dishes, while one roommate thought what I did was hilarious.

Finally, Emily came back home. As soon as she saw the write-up slip, of course, she took her anger out on me.

But it seemed as though something clicked and she realized the argument she had with me earlier and she caved. She finally went and did the dishes. Of course, I asked her if she needed help and she pushed me away.

About two days later, the same inspectors from before came back to inspect the apartment a second time. I wasn’t there to see it, but one of our roommates was there and said we passed inspection that time. We were still bummed for being written up the first time, but that thankfully didn’t happen again during my internship.”

Another User Comments:

“What the heck kind of internship cares about whether or not the dishes are done by a certain time? I mean, I get that they want to make sure a bunch of kids don’t trash their place, but this goes so far beyond anything that would otherwise be military standards. I’m having trouble accepting it.” Stabbmaster

3 points - Liked by Alliauraa, migi and stargazer228
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2. Come Get It All? You Got It!

“Some background, I used to work at a rent-to-own company that we can call a rental center. My state takes a dim view of rent to own so to get around it rental center offers a “rental term” at the end of which your last few payments are converted to a loan and when you pay it off the rental is yours.

When you start you get a 90-day price, but if it isn’t paid off on day 91, you’re in it for the long haul. Basically 4 times the 90-day price. You could package items together to make your weekly bill cheaper.

You could turn in anything you wanted but to get it back you had to start over. Our store-bought items on credit and as an item was paid on by a customer, the amount we owed was paid on. So we buy an item for 500, you rent it and pay 50 payments maybe we owe 50 bucks still.

If you turn it in we rent it to someone else at the full rental price but still only owe the last 50.

Anyway, one day a pain in the butt customer I’ll call Karen, called to have us pick up a stove.

We went, grabbed it, and brought it back, no problem. A week later, I’m doing inventory. I find the stove and it isn’t on my in-store inventory list. I look it up to see why and it turns out this thing was in a package with 2 other items and her account rep didn’t check.

Those other 2 items are still there.

We had this dumb rule where if you turn something in to be counted among inventory it had to physically be brought back into the store. I realize this lady has 2 items that have to be brought back before I can reissue a contract for them.

I know this is going to be annoying so I look at the 2 items she still had. Turns out we only owe like 120 bucks left for the 2 remaining items so what I decide to do is offer her, her fridge and window ac at $120, 90 days for the hassle of having to pick them up.

This was going to save her a bunch of money in the long run, even if she couldn’t pay it in 90 days. So I’d pick them up, bring them back, count them as inventory, write up the new contract, and bring them back in an hour.

She saves a metric crap ton everybody wins.

I’m usually great with customers and I can usually calm them down when a problem comes up so I call and tell Karen about the problem, letting her know I need to pick them up.

Before I can tell her the freakin deal she is about to get for the trouble she starts cursing at me. “THIS is NONSENSE! You people are incompetent,” lots worse names, and so on. This call lasted 20 minutes with her freaking out the whole time.

I keep trying to say hold on let me explain, but Karen has skipped, “May I speak to the manager” and gone full scorched Earth. She says come get it all! I try again to diffuse the situation and explain but get called some vile crap for my trouble and again get told to come to get it all! I look at the computer, smile and say ok sure! Cue malicious compliance.

Karen didn’t realize come get it would basically mean empty my trailer. She had a fridge and an ac along with the stove. She had a living room set, 2 TVs, 2 other window unit acs, a bed, she even had lamps.

This lady had been paying on this stuff for a long time and some of these contracts are close to the final term. She was about to lose it all. I get in an empty truck w/ another employee and drive to her trailer and her husband answers the door.

Dude, I feel bad for her husband to this day… he was super nice! I tell him Karen has told us to come get everything and he opens the door while apologizing to me for her behavior. She’s not there. I tried to talk to him about the deal, hoping he could calm it down but he said it was just better to do what she wanted.

So we load all the big stuff as fast as we can. I’m about to grab one of the ac units when I hear her pull up. She comes storming up the driveway cursing us with one of her friends. I hear her get to the front door.

Her husband is there. I hear her say to her husband “YOU’RE AS STUPID AS YOUR MOTHER!” Her husband has apparently been conditioned to this and doesn’t say anything. I decide I’m not carrying the window ac through the house with her acting like this so I just lift the window and let it fall out, I’d go around outside and pick it up.

The other employee walks out and as she’s cursing at him he goes and sits in the truck. I come out and Karen goes nuclear.

“This is such nonsense! Why are you taking this stuff, blah blah blah, followed by some horrible names and a lot of cursing.” I smile and say you told me to come get everything…

Twice! I walk right past her smiling. I grab the fallen ac unit while she is stammering, “You better bring all that back right now! (She followed these statements with name-calling and talking crap, talking about our families, anything and everything.) If she had just stopped for a moment and spoken to me like a human I would have put it back, but she didn’t.

I put the ac on the truck and say, “I’m sorry, I can’t do that. Once it’s on the truck, it HAS to go back to the store to inventory and check it for damage,” but then I’d be glad to talk to her about putting it on a new contract.

While I was finishing loading up the truck, this lady is calling me every vile thing she could think of, and my responses are things like “uh huh” and “ok” all with a smile on my face like she is saying the sweetest things.

The more I do this, the more red and angry she becomes. I wave and smile like we are old friends and say have a nice day! I swear to you I have never before or since seen someone’s face turn purple with rage.

She yells, “Screw you!” And I say, “Ok, you too” like she’d just said she’d miss me, and drove off. That was the day I learned that nothing will make a Karen madder than a sweet smile when they think you should be upset.”

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1. Want Me To Print It All Out? Okay, But It Won't Be Cheap

Printing may be pretty cheap, but when you’re printing out thousands of pages, well, the cost adds up very quickly…

“The first “real job” I had when I left college was for an aerospace company that is fairly well-known for its commercial airplanes.

I managed to learn fast and then streamline a lot of the processes that were holdovers from what most of my coworkers called “The Lazy B” down the road. One of those processes that saved an enormous amount of money was the move away from print copies to PDF review.

The company went through reams upon reams of 8.5×11 and 11×17 paper every day, and we had the laser printer/copier guys out every week. Just implementing my process, I saved the company around $5k in the first month alone, and more every month after that as more of the engineering review and document processing moved to PDF.

About two years into this, my boss’s boss hired a guy out of Kansas who epitomized the term “fake laconic.” He had bounced from shop to shop and came to us because his friend had become a manager at our company (this friend being one of the few engineering leads who refused to implement the new secured PDF review system).

By this time I’d already gotten several salary promotions and was over a team of five other people managing their work and submitting it to my boss, who spent less time having me do the work that I was originally hired to do and more time looking at how to automate a lot of our processes (one of those being teaching everyone to hit F7 and spend five minutes with a spell checker – and then setting up a script that did the same thing with every document submitted so that we didn’t have to pay the FAA guys to reject our stuff based on stupid punctuation and spelling mistakes).

Technically speaking, Kansas Boy was going to be an editor, which meant I needed to work with him in the submission process and get his input on the best way to integrate eyes-on review for specialty lines of business into our system.

This did not go well.

The first meeting I had with him, it took him over a minute to finish a sentence that when I counted, was less than 50 words total (not including redundant words and “Weeeeeeeeeellll…” and other faked drawls.) The second meeting had him saying, to me, “Man, you gots to slow down, you work yourself right out of a job!”

When, decades later, I played Red Dead Redemption 2 for the first time, I nearly quit playing the first time I heard Arthur Morgan open his mouth.

If Arthur Morgan took fifty seconds to say twenty words, that was EXACTLY how Kansas Boy spoke.

Irritating was not half of it.

It did not help my perception of his being stuck in the 80s that he wore his hair in a modified mullet and wore a mustache and made sexist comments multiple times about our boss, who was a single mom with three kids and an actual Texas accent.

Things eventually came to a head between us when he was given just enough approval power to demand that he receive print copies of the documents before he would review them.

At that point, he had bogged the review process down so much that he had bottlenecked four projects, with the intention of taking people away from my team to “train properly as editors”.

He would work extra hours and then “take work home” – which as far as I could tell meant he would take it home and leave it on his table while he watched the football game. Since he was on an hourly wage, it also meant anything we had to have him review blew up in project hours by double the estimate.

And because you had to be signed in to the system to review work on my PDF system, and it tracked connection and access time, as well as when a modification was made to the document, he really didn’t like using it.

As for me, I was salaried and perfectly happy that way. But I ran up against this clown taking hours and days to review things that could have been done in minutes if he just learned how to press three buttons, and he would refuse to do it.

Eventually, I went to the director of engineering and explained what was happening, which resulted in a conversation with this guy’s friend, who then went out of his way to insist that the PDF review process wasn’t secure (it was), that it was inefficient (it wasn’t) and that the best way to do things was the way Kansas boy liked to do them.

Months went by and the project bogged. Mostly because of Kansas Boy’s review “process.” Finally, it was down to the last week of submission, and my team had done everything they needed to do per our submission process.

The director called me in on Monday and said because this engineering lead was connected to the new project, he had the final say over how the documentation and instructions for install were going to be handled, and that my teams and I should support their team to the best of my ability.

Then he invited me to play golf with him that weekend.

I don’t play golf. I have never played golf. I can play minigolf with four shots of Ouzo and a can of beer in my hand, but the last time I played golf I hit a caddy with a golf ball on the previous hole.

Twice. Nobody knows how. The point is that inviting me to play golf is like asking a basketball player to play professional llama polo. You don’t do it unless there’s another reason that doesn’t involve watching very tall men avoid getting bitten by irritated camelids and laughing.

Then I got a memo (written on actual paper in a time of email) from Kansas Boy about a meeting to discuss the submission issues.

By lunch, I had had four hours of meetings with Kansas and his Lead (referred to by most of the people in the company as Duchee – a reference both to his being a French Canadian citizen and…well, a jerk), who were laying out, very smugly, their requirements for how they were submitting all their documents.

Having been given carte blanche to run this project to completion, they sat there and dictated exactly how it was all going to go down.

All of their documents were due by Friday afternoon. Over 700,000 pages of reports, assessments, drawings, installation manuals, etc.

For a personal review of every page by Kansas boy and his paid intern (who was the only person that hadn’t quit after being transferred to his team). It was impressed upon me that this project was under the eye of the president of the company itself.

And they insisted they all be printed out, completely in paper.

These arrogant schmucks were all but picking nuts out of their poop-eating grins at the end of the meeting.

I should mention that at this point there were so few printers used in the company that the massive copier/printer in the file archive was the only one really capable of handling the load.

Everything else was the standard small office laser printer setup with less than three reams of paper usable.

To wit, the amount of printing they wanted to do would take about the full capacity of the whole company’s printing capacity UNLESS we hired an external contractor to do it, which couldn’t happen in the short turnaround time they had.

And since my purview at that point included the production of documentation, it technically fell into my lap to make it happen.

They also told me that if I managed to complete it by Friday, the company would get a bonus from our client, which was incredibly important as this was a client we wanted to impress to get more business from in the future (and not coincidentally, our company’s profit-sharing incentives would reward the people who made that happen at the end of the year, meaning that the two of them would get bonuses for being the face of this particular project while everyone who actually made it happen would get…a $5 Starbucks gift card.

Yeah.)

Tuesday, I pulled all ten of my team members off their projects and retasked them to printing everything. We commandeered every single printer in the building, including the president’s personal laser printer and the photocopier his secretary used. I had them working overtime four hours a night with pizza and beer with stacks of toner, reams of paper, and repurposed the biggest conference rooms with laptops and printers, and parked myself in the file archives with the big beast to run the majority of the work.

At the end of the week we had more angry complaints (“hey man, this is the project Kansas Boy and Duchee tasked us to do. If you need to have a conversation, I suggest you take it up with them) ranging from the conference room being occupied by our operation to lack of printing supplies, staples, and overloaded print queues for almost everything.

At one point the FAA guy who was in charge of the project stepped in and demanded to know when he could print out HIS files – which were needed to actually submit all this crap.

We made it happen on Thursday night with three hours to spare before the deadline of Friday morning, Greenwich standard time (this is PST).

We delivered the whole thing to Kansas Boy’s 6-foot by six-foot cubicle. All 700,000 pages of it, in boxes and boxes of paper. Stacked precisely in his cube so as to prevent any blocking of the emergency egress, as per our ISO 9000 and safety protocols.

And we provided an electronic copy of everything we would submit normally to the FAA guy, whose responsibility it was to review everything before submission – but more to the point, to review anything that deviated from the normal submission package that was either a client request or a new submission methodology.

Anything new or modified, he only wanted to have print copies of the changed pages.

I want to be clear – while we did block Kansas Boy’s desk almost completely, this was not the malicious part.

When I came into the job, one of the new hires in my orientation class had a tradition of taking a tiny vector line art drawing figure of his alma mater’s mascot and adding it to every single file.

It was never significant enough to be seen even on a full plot of an engineering drawing, but that was his running joke for every single drawing he worked on.

The engineering state university that was the rival to his school also had a few engineers that worked at our company, and they began putting THEIR mascot in vector line art into their drawings.

Then someone who had a different sense of humor (cough cough) made one from a popular animated cartoon of the 1980s that, at a certain size, looked absolutely nothing like a robot that turned into a jet plane and more like a very small standard metric but, and made it available in the library of standard parts as a “do not use this model” part for a drawing template.

None of these things are kosher to include on an official engineering specification, even in drawing form. Even if the plotter at maximum size cannot determine if it is a school mascot or a maple leaf or a goofy robot toy from the 1980s.

The only reason that the company got away with it was because nobody was stupid enough to resize all of the CAD components to show exactly what every single part was supposed to look like.

Once I realized what would happen if it ever came out or the models made it through to submission, I had the engineers who did this as a game go through their old drawings and take their little mascots out, and asked them to pass it on to anyone who did the same.

Being able to search the engineering database by part number meant I could also flag those drawings for editing and have the people responsible for them take them out.

Unfortunately, nobody knew that someone (cough cough DUCHEE cough cough) had included his own little vector art thing, which was an inappropriate image of a woman.

It never made it into the primary database of templates, because the engineering team and template review group I had set up for that purpose never received a copy of the template set from Duchee’s group, because he refused to use the standard templates because they weren’t “up to his standard”.

Nor did we know he had left it on every single one of the templates he demanded his team use, because he was still one of the holdouts who refused to use the system to check drawings in and out of the main database until he had approved them from his team.

He DID, however, check them into the database of approved drawings once they had been submitted to both the client and the FAA, meaning that the copies of the most recent files were on record, but as far as participating in the rest of it? Nope.

His excuse was that his team worked better that way.

And yet that meant, of course, that any given part that HE chose a specific ID number for would often conflict with other part numbers in the database, which would then result in a meeting to iron out the fact that he was ignoring the convention everyone else used (meaning check the database to make sure you weren’t creating two identical part numbers for two completely different parts in your drawing).

To add insult to injury and irritation for his team members, he also placed his name on almost every single one regardless of who had done the drawing, which meant that anyone who needed information about the project had to go through him instead of checking with the person who built the model in the first place.

Duchee had more turnover on his team than anywhere else in the company for multiple reasons, but the fact that he would routinely take credit for engineering drawings he didn’t do at a company that tended to use how many you did as a metric for your job performance was a huge one.

His insistence on making extra work that didn’t actually help the client was another. And his general jerkery towards anyone who told him “no” was another – especially those who used it when he told them they had to work through the weekend because his team was behind again on their projects.

This big, huge project was no exception to his “make work” idiocy.

As part of the submission for this particular project, Duchee had demanded to have a full catalog of every single modeled part and component printed up and submitted with every single engineering drawing so that the client (who hadn’t asked for it) would be able to determine which part they needed.

His rationale was that because we were the source supplier for 60% of the parts included, we could make sure they knew we were the only ones they could buy them from.

And the one thing Duchee had decided to actually allow to be automated in this process? A script that expanded every single component on the engineering drawing to full 8.5″x11″ page size and submitted it as part of the official engineering parts list.

You might see where this is going.

I had taken Friday off, but on Monday morning I got a call from the VP’s personal assistant to come into the office for an important meeting.

On Friday afternoon, I walked into the conference room next to my director’s office.

My director had the most poker-faced expression I have ever seen on his face when he opened the door and let me into one of the loudest ass-chewings I ever have walked in on before or since.

The FAA rep, the president of the company, the VP of our department, Kansas Boy, and Duchee were all sitting around the table.

The FAA rep, a generally fairly genial, round-bellied man, was yelling at Duchee and Kansas Boy at the top of his lungs about how serious this matter was and how ridiculous they would make the company look, and that if he submitted this garbage the fact that he let it through would at the very least require a full review of every single document he had approved while working with our company.

When there was a pause in the barrage, my director asked me if I knew if there were any non-standard drawings or cartoons in our engineering database of CAD files. I said, “Well, yeah. Those are the template example parts that are removed automatically from the template when someone copies it to their local drive.

They’re just there as examples. They’re labeled that way, too. Nobody actually keeps those, and they can’t; they’re deleted from the drawing immediately when someone saves a local copy of the template.”

And that’s when the VP, a woman in her mid-40s brought in to change the heavy bro-culture of our company, said, “you actually keep THIS as an example in your template database??” and held up a full ream’s worth of blown-up Canadian Hockey adult content vector line art images framed beautifully in an engineering 3D isometric part view.

My jaw dropped open and I think I made some odd noises that could have been mistaken for strangled laughter.

“Kansas Boy and Duchee tell us you’re responsible for maintaining the full engineering part database system. So if the buck stops with you, this is on you to explain to everyone here what this is doing here.

Can you honestly say you’ve never seen this image before in your database?”

I shot a look at both Kansas Boy and Duchee, who were both looking at me the way a chicken watches someone with an axe walking across the farmyard to the grindstone.

Because I had seen a full blown-up copy of that image colored in with highlighter on Kansas Boy’s desk, I said, “Yeah, you probably should take that down, that’s not appropriate for a workplace environment” before getting a long-drawn-out drawled explanation of where a stick was and why I should pull it out of my butt.

He knew I knew where I’d seen it before. And while I didn’t know where Kansas Boy had gotten it from, I could make an educated guess.

And they both knew I had zero inclination to even pretend to take a hit for them.

The bus was rolling downhill and while I wasn’t throwing them under it like they’d tried to throw me, I sure as crap wasn’t going to push them out of the way.

My jaw worked a few more times before I said, “Yes, I can honestly say it does not exist in the engineering database.

Now or ever. I can show you what DOES exist, and the history of created part numbers. I know for certain that the part number does not exist. Here,” and pulled up the template database on my director’s computer.

We went through the full template database using every iteration of that particular part number until the VP was satisfied.

Then she asked me, “And you and your team never saw this while you were doing all the printing this week?”

“I can’t speak to anyone else, but if we had seen it we would have flagged it. We would have immediately brought it to the attention of the reviewer of the schematic (Kansas Boy) and the engineer whose name is on the drawing (Duchee) to have it removed immediately.

We can run a search in the full engineering database to see where this part number shows up on all drawings so long as we make sure to search for all hidden part numbers.”

Duchee, said, “Oh no, that would take way too much time, we can’t do that, we have to submit this by the end of day today.”

Kansas Boy, in one of the speediest possible sentences I had ever heard come out of his mouth, said the exact same thing.

The president, who had been glowering in the corner, said, “This project is on hold until we determine exactly how compromised these engineering drawings are, and every single drawing that this part shows up on must be resubmitted and reviewed by at least three people, one of whom is going to be the lead engineer who signed off on every one of these and at least one senior manager of engineering who isn’t involved.

We aren’t this kind of company.”

Duchee and Kansas Boy actually went white at that, and both started looking at me with this pleading expression. The axe was sharpened to a razor’s edge and now it was down to whether fried chicken or duck a la orange was on the menu.

The president looked at me and said, “Run the search. I don’t care how long it takes. I want a copy on VP’s desk in print of every drawing with this part in our database, and one for everyone in this room, along with who created the drawing, who reviewed it, and who approved it.”

Now, I’m one of the only people in the company who had admin access to the engineering part database, because I helped create it, and I set an automated rule that forced everyone who used it to change their password once a month to a new sixteen or more character string with symbols and numbers.

I knew for a fact nobody who had access to it was in the office except me.

So did my director, who did have access but kept forgetting the code, and eventually told me just to take him off the list because, as he put it, “I know just enough to be dangerous.”

I said, “Absolutely.

It will probably take at least six hours. Do you want me to stay late to finish it?”

The director looked at me after checking with the VP and President and said, “No, you and your team already clocked over 80 hours each this week dealing with this deadline.

Take the weekend and get it to us by Monday afternoon.”

Now Kansas Boy and Duchee are looking like they need to get up but they’re being held back, so I grabbed a secured laptop from one of the IT guys that I used for maintaining the database, headed to the IT department secure server room, plugged it in to run overnight, logged in to my account, started the compilation, locked the screen with an authentication dongle, pulled it from the USB port, stuck it in my pocket, then headed home.

About ten minutes after I left I began getting panicked phone calls from my work number on my mobile. Then I began getting email notifications. Since the director had my number and he would just call me from his mobile and would give it to the VP and President if they needed it, I knew it was Kansas Boy and Duchee.

So I ignored it. Because screw them.

The next day I went golfing with my director as part of a charity golf event he had been working on and, as it turned out, the president and his wife, who all agreed that my golfing was utterly terrible, and laughably so.

They kept me around for the rest of the evening for dinner and a charity auction and got me intoxicated enough that they called me a cab and had a valet from the club drive my car home for me.

Sunday I spent recuperating.

Monday morning I went into the office, opened up the IT server room and found the laptop I had left plugged in missing. After checking with the IT crew, they let me know that Kansas Boy had insisted on Saturday morning that he needed to get the laptop to provide a critical list to the president by the end of the day.

By Saturday afternoon he had browbeat the help desk guy making barely $15 an hour into letting him in to “check on it” but after an hour said he was done and left.

When I went by Duchee’s desk on my way to the director’s office right after I found out about the laptop incident, he and Kansas Boy were talking at his desk.

Kansas gave me a huge poop-eating smirk and then laughed. Duchee still looked worried, but less so.

When I walked out of my director’s five-minute closed-door session, my director said, “You know you didn’t have to make print copies, and you didn’t have to come in Saturday morning to do it.

You could have just sent us a PDF file.”

“Yeah, but you know Kansas Boy and Duchee like their print copies,” and I walked over to hand two thick wodges of printed database info to both Kansas and Duchee. Looking right at them, I said, “Besides.

I was up early on Saturday anyway for the golf tournament and I had to give President his laser printer back. Might as well make some last copies before it all goes back to normal.”

When I dropped off the list, I said, “yeah, I gave everyone else their copies Saturday morning.”

On that list was every single engineering drawing from Duchee’s team.

Duchee had put his name on every single piece of paper his team had produced as either the originating engineer or the approving engineer. Kansas Boy was the reviewer of the record.

Over 40,000 engineering drawings last and present had their little project.

Maple leaf part in them. From the project itself, there were nearly 150,000 pages of documentation referencing those drawings and using the line vector art from those files.

By noon, both Duchee and Kansas Boy’s desks were completely empty. Duchee had been fired and frog-marched from the building.

Kansas Boy saw the writing on the wall and managed to submit his letter of resignation right before HR finished the paperwork.

I left that company a few years later, and I’d like to say they never worked in aerospace again, but the reality is that both were working for a major airplane manufacturer within months of this story.

And that’s why I quit working in aerospace.”

1 points - Liked by Alliauraa and migi
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stro 1 year ago
Tldr that is all
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