r/MaliciousCompliance

I work in customer services for my council, and because of the policies in my job, I have to be the bad guy frequently as I have to say no to people, and frequently, people want to speak to my manager because of this. I always refuse to escalate because I don’t engage with adult tantrums. Whether you speak to me or the CEO, it’s going to be a no so accept it now and move on with your day to avoid further frustration

I recently got a new manager and a couple of weeks ago, someone complained about me for refusing to escalate the call and he agreed with them and told me that in the future, I should escalate the call if someone requests to speak to him

I explained to them that I don’t escalate because it’s pointless as they’ll also say no too, as it’s a policy. I explained that speaking to someone just to repeat what has already been said is a waste of both their times and that I don’t want to contribute to this ‘I want a manager!’ view that people have, but he shut me down and told that whenever someone requests a manager, I must call him and see if he’s free and if he’s not, I should email him their details and the issue and he’d call them back that day

Cue malicious compliance - the second someone requested to speak to a manager/someone ‘in authority’ etc I called him and asked him to take the call and the first few times he took it, and then he suddenly became less free and started telling me to email him the details and he’ll call back later. Later started to turn into the next day or later in the week. I battered him with the multiple escalations that I would have ordinarily refused over these past couple of weeks

As I was in the office, I could tell he was getting stressed because I could hear him on his escalation calls and it was clear that he’d bitten off more than he could chew with dealing with these escalations as the calls steered into them trying to get my no turned into a yes by speaking to him

He was getting flustered and telling people he’d speak to the managers in the other departments, and then he’d have to call them back to tell them that he’s looked into it and it’s a no - as I told them already on my call with them

In a complete u-turn, he emailed me today to tell me that I can go back to dealing with escalation requests the way I want to and if someone raises a complaint, he’ll back me up - he went from ‘you must escalate’ to ‘please shield me’ in the space of two weeks

this was junior year, research methods class. our professor, I'll call him Dr. K, had this thing where he would make bold claims during lectures without citing anything and then get annoyed if students pushed back on it. classic "I have a PhD so my word is the source" energy. at some point he made a sweeping statement about consumer behavior that directly contradicted something I had read in two separate peer reviewed papers, I raised my hand and mentioned this, and he said, and I quote, "in this class, any source is valid as long as you cite it correctly. the quality of your argument is what matters."

okay.

I wrote my next paper arguing the opposite of his claim. my primary source for the counter-argument was a transcript I had made of his own lecture from three weeks earlier where he had said something that, read carefully, actually undermined his newer position. I cited it as: [Last name, First initial. Class lecture, Course number, University name, Date.] formatted exactly according to the citation guide he gave us on day one.

he handed back papers with written comments. mine said "interesting argument, strong structure" and then at the bottom: "this citation is not acceptable, please see me."

I went to see him. I brought the citation guide. I showed him the format. I showed him his own quote. I asked which part of the citation requirements I had failed to meet. there was a long pause. he changed my grade from a B+ to an A- and told me the citation was "technically valid but in poor taste."

I have never felt more seen by a grade in my life.

okay so I go to a mid-size gym, been a member for about two years. they have a section in the back with nicer equipment, better cables, the kind of adjustable bench that doesn't wobble, a decent amount of space. in practice this area was quietly treated as the trainer zone. no sign saying members couldn't use it, no rule in the membership agreement, just an unspoken thing where if a regular member wandered in there a trainer would kind of appear and hover until you felt weird and left.

I asked the front desk once if members could use that area. the guy looked slightly uncomfortable and said "all equipment is available to all members at any time, that's our policy." I said great thanks and went home and did nothing with that information for about three weeks.

then one Tuesday I just. walked back there and set up. used the good cables for an hour, wiped everything down, was completely out of anyone's way. a trainer came over and asked if I needed help with anything. I said no thanks I'm good. he stood nearby for a bit then left. this happened maybe three more times over two weeks, different trainers each time, same script, same outcome.

week three the gym manager came over and said the back area was "typically reserved for personal training sessions." I asked if that was written in the membership policy because I had asked at the front desk and been told all equipment was available to all members. she went and checked something on the computer. came back and said "you're right that's our stated policy, we just ask that you be mindful of trainer schedules."

I said absolutely I would be mindful. I have been using that area three times a week since February. not a single trainer has approached me in six weeks. the wobby bench in the main area remains wobby.

quick context. I rent a parking spot through my apartment building, separate monthly fee, been doing it for eighteen months. about four months ago they resurfaced the lot and in the process painted the spot lines slightly differently and my spot ended up about eight inches narrower than it was before on the driver side, which means I have to either park crooked or get out on the passenger side and climb over. I'm 6'2 and this is not a small inconvenience.

I went to the building office to mention it. the woman at the desk, very nice, clearly did not want to deal with this, told me that maintenance issues had to be submitted in writing through the tenant portal and that verbal complaints couldn't be logged. fine. I went home and logged into the tenant portal.

the complaint field had no character limit.

I want to be clear that I did not plan what happened next, it kind of evolved organically. I started describing the issue. then I found myself naturally providing context, the history of the spot, the resurfacing timeline, a brief overview of standard parking spot width regulations in our state which I had looked up out of curiosity, a description of the specific physical challenges the current configuration presents for a person of my height and build, a comparison of my ingress and egress times before and after the resurfacing based on my rough estimates, and a short conclusion paragraph summarizing my requested resolution which was simply to repaint the line.

the complaint was 1,847 words. I have written shorter college essays.

I submitted it at 11pm on a Wednesday. by Friday morning the building manager had called me personally, which had never happened before in eighteen months, to let me know they would be repainting the spot the following week.

the line has been repainted. I get out on the drivers side now like a normal person. I like to think somewhere in a filing system there is a 1,847 word document about a parking spot that someone had to read in its entirety.

This was at a office job maybe three years ago. For context, I was the kind of person who ate lunch at my desk, answered emails while chewing, and generally treated my lunch break as a suggestion rather than an actual break. Not because anyone forced me to, just habit I guess, and the work piled up fast enough that it felt easier to keep going. My manager at the time, I'll call her Diane, was fine overall but had this specific thing where she would occasionally make pointed comments about people "not respecting boundaries between work time and personal time." Directed at others, never at me. Then we got a new HR policy rolled out company wide. Employees must take a minimum 30 minute uninterrupted lunch break, no work tasks during that period, and managers were told to enforce it. Diane sent the team an email saying she expected full compliance and that anyone seen working through lunch would be reminded of the policy. She CC'd HR.

So I complied. Fully. I started leaving my desk at exactly 12:30 every single day, leaving my laptop behind, going outside or to the break room, and not touching anything work related for 35 minutes. Which meant that the two or three things that used to get handled quietly during my lunch, the small fires, the quick replies to clients, the thing Diane liked to ping me about at 12:45 because she knew I was "around", those stopped getting handled until I was back. By week two Diane asked if everything was okay because she'd noticed I was "less responsive" around midday. I showed her the email she sent. She CCd HR on it herself. She did not bring it up again and I have eaten outside every single workday since.

some background: I have a beagle named Potato. Potato barks, this is a known beagle fact, I did not purchase a beagle under the impression that I was getting a quiet animal. my neighbor Greg (yes another Greg in my life, I attract them apparently) has been leaving notes on my door about it for about six months, escalating in tone each time, the last one said "one more time and I'm calling the city, there are RULES." capitalized and everything.

so instead of apologizing again I actually looked up the city noise ordinance. turns out dogs are only a violation if they bark continuously for more than 10 minutes between 10pm and 7am OR more than 30 minutes during the day. Potato does not do this. Potato barks when someone walks past, maybe 4 or 5 times, then moves on with her life. I timed it once just to be sure. 23 seconds. I printed out the relevant section of the ordinance, highlighted the specific thresholds, and left it in Greg's mailbox with a small sticky note that said "looked into it, we're good! have a great week."

Greg did call the city. an officer came out, I showed him the same printout, he said Potato did not appear to be in violation and that I seemed to have done my research. Greg was apparently watching from his window the whole time bc right after the officer left he came outside and said I was being deliberately difficult. I said I was just trying to understand the rules so I could be a good neighbor.

Potato has since barked at Greg directly through the fence twice and both times I have said good girl and meant it.

I worked in a call center for a home warranty company for about a year and a half. If you don't know what that is, basically people pay a monthly fee and we cover repairs on appliances and home systems. The calls ranged from totally fine to absolutely miserable depending on the customer and the day.

Our team had a supervisor I'll call Brenda. Brenda was very by the book, which is fine, but she had one specific thing that drove everyone insane: she was obsessed with the official call script. Every call had to open and close exactly as written, word for word, no variation, even if the phrasing was awkward or didn't quite fit the situation. A few of us had developed slightly smoother ways of saying the same things that customers actually responded better to, but Brenda kept monitoring calls and flagging anyone who deviated even a little. She pulled me aside twice in one week and told me to use the exact script, nothing more, nothing less, or it would go in my review.

So I did exactly that. The closing script, written by whoever wrote it back in 2014 apparently, ended with the following: "Is there anything else I can assist you with today regarding your home warranty plan or any of the covered systems or appliances included therein?" Every single call. Word for word. Customers would go quiet for a second because it sounds like a legal document, some would laugh, one guy asked me if I was a robot.

The best part was a call near the end of my second week of full compliance. A customer said "did you just say included therein?" and I said yes sir that is our official closing. He laughed for a solid 20 seconds and then asked to speak to a manager to compliment me specifically for being the funniest customer service rep he'd ever talked to. I transfered him to Brenda.

She never mentioned the script to me again after that.

some background. I work in an open office, about 40 people, one shared kitchen. for the past year there has been a rotating cast of people who leave dishes in the sink, wipe nothing down, and generally treat the microwave like it's someone else's problem. management sent three separate emails about it over the course of like eight months. passive aggressive notes appeared on the fridge. nothing changed.

then in January our office manager Karen (not using a fake name, her name is actually Karen, which I recognize is a lot) announced at an all-hands that "the kitchen is everyone's responsibility and everyone will be held equally accountable going forward." she looked very satisfied saying this. a few people nodded. I wrote it down.

I took her at her word.

I started showing up to the kitchen at random points during the day to wipe down surfaces, clean the microwave, organize the condiment shelf, throw out expired stuff from the communal basket. not my mess, didn't matter. equal responsibility means equal responsibility. I kept a casual log on my phone just for my own interest. over six weeks I cleaned the microwave fourteen times. I wiped the counter after other people's spills maybe thirty times. I threw out a cream cheese that expired in october.

week seven Karen pulled me aside and said she'd noticed I was spending a lot of time in the kitchen and asked if everything was okay and did I have enough work to do.

I showed her the all-hands email on my phone. I told her I was just honoring the equal accountability policy. she stared at me for a moment and then said "that's not really what I meant."

the kitchen has been noticeably cleaner since that conversation. I choose to belive this is not a coincidence.

Someone parked their expensive vehicle in a way that blocked the handicap parking spot where we used to live, even crossed the blue line slightly. There were only two people, one being myself, who had a handicap plate... I knew the other person who needed it would not be able to get out of their car, so I didn't take the second handicap spot. While we both have valid plates for handicap parking, they needed the spot more than I did.

I love it when someone invites me to play the FAFO game... Cue my behavior modification plan: The parking spot on the offending vehicles other side was available with it being that vehicles driver's side. I decided I was going to park in a way that left them under 6 inches to get in their vehicle, I even pushed my passenger side mirror in to get a close as possible. Leaving them with the only choice of crawling in from their passenger side.

Between the day this occurred and when we moved out 6 months later, that vehicle never repeated that again. If they had been pissy & tried to dent my 10yr old minivan, no sweat, I happened to document their license plate.

The neighbors who needed the handicap parking more than I did couldn't stop laughing, the elderly woman said it made her day!

This happened at a call center job I had a few years ago. We had a manager, I'll call him Derek, who was very fond of saying "document everything" whenever there was any kind of dispute or miscommunication. Paper trail, he'd say. Always have a paper trail. Derek also had a habit of giving verbal instructions that contradicted what was in the written procedures. Small things mostly, like telling us to skip certain steps to handle calls faster, or to process refunds in a way that wasn't quite by the book. When you'd ask him to put it in writing he'd wave it off and say "just do it, I'll back you up."

After the third time I got flagged in a quality review for following Derek's verbal instructions, I started documenting everything. Every time he told me something verbally I would send him an email immediately after saying "just to confirm, you're asking me to do X in situation Y, let me know if I got that wrong." He always ignored those emails. Never confirmed, never corrected. After about two months of this there was a bigger issue where a process I followed, again based on his verbal instruction, caused a problem that got escalated. Derek said in the meeting that he never told me to do it that way.

I forwarded the email chain. Fourteen emails. All sent within minutes of our conversations. All ignored by him, timestamped, with no correction ever sent. The meeting got very quiet. Derek said the emails "didn't reflect the full context." His manager, who was also in the room, asked him to walk through what the full context was. He could not really do that.

I kept my job. Derek was moved to a different role about six weeks later. I still send followup emails for everything.

I’m technically a help desk employee, but my role is mostly system administration. I have a home office I go to very rarely, only as needed, but I mostly work remotely since most of my job doesn’t need to be done in person.

On a Thursday, I got an email from HR with a single picture from someone requesting that their monitors be relocated, their wires “untangled,” and that they be given a matching monitor. Their desk looked fine from the picture. I couldn’t see anything obviously wrong with it.

So I did what any sensible IT person would do and asked for more information so I could arrive on Monday with everything needed to get the job done correctly the first time.

I asked whether extra equipment would be shipped to the location, including a new monitor setup and new cables. I asked for additional pictures of the tangled wires so I could see what needed to be fixed, and I asked for more specifics on the goal of moving the monitors. Did they want the setup rearranged? Did I need to drill a hole in the desk to route things better? Very basic questions. The most important one was whether hardware would be shipped out.

My manager replied and told me to just go out there and do it.

DO WHAT?

I can’t do anything without new hardware and more information. HR then replied with another picture showing that the power cords were hanging under the desk and the power strip was floating in the air. That was clearly a problem and would have been very helpful to know from the start. But I still didn’t have any confirmation that hardware had been shipped, and I already knew that office didn’t have the equipment needed to do what they wanted. The existing cables were simply too short, even if I drilled a new access hole in the desk.

Some important context: I’d heard they might be axing the entire IT department and outsourcing it, and I had a feeling I was being set up to fail so they’d have justification to write me up or fire me. I haven’t been written up yet, but companies are doing this kind of thing all the time right now.

So I decided I wasn’t going to get played.

This person was going to end up with the nicest desk in the office. I spent about $400 on two brand-new 27-inch monitors, a dual monitor arm, and 10-foot cables so I could route everything perfectly. I’ll submit an expense report and get reimbursed for it.

This person works at the front desk, so everyone is going to see this setup, and it’s going to make the other employees jealous. The rest of the office has a random assortment of mismatched equipment, so everyone else is going to look at this and ask, “Why did they get that? I want that too.” Which, of course, is going to create a huge headache for the office manager and HR.

The employee got exactly what they wanted, and because it came through HR, this was probably some kind of health-related accommodation request, which means we have to do it.

Now HR gets to deal with the fallout of buying a bunch of equipment to accommodate everyone else. Three $5 longer cables could have solved the problem, but instead I’m hoping this turns into a flood of complaints and at least $5,000 worth of monitor arms and displays.

I work as a regional delivery driver for a wholesale food supplier. Most of the time it’s straightforward, but we recently got a new "Operations Coordinator" (let’s call him Kevin) who is obsessed with data and "fuel optimization."

Last month, Kevin implemented a strict policy: all drivers must follow the GPS route provided by the company’s new AI-logistics software. No deviations. His logic, which he explained in a very condescending memo, was that "human intuition regarding traffic is statistically inferior to the algorithm," and that every extra mile driven to avoid a jam is "unnecessary carbon emission and a waste of company resources." He literally told us that if the GPS says to stay on the highway, we stay on the highway, because the system has already accounted for the most fuel-efficient path.

Last Thursday, I was hauling a shipment of high-end frozen seafood to a resort. About 10 miles from my exit, I saw the dreaded sea of red brake lights. A massive tanker had flipped, shutting down all four lanes. My personal GPS immediately suggested a detour through a backroad that would add only 5 miles but save me hours.

I called Kevin to get authorization to deviate. He actually laughed. He told me, and I quote: "The AI sees the delay, and it still hasn't recalculated a detour, which means staying put is more fuel-efficient than idling through stop-and-go backroads. Do your job, stay on the manifest route, and stop trying to be a hero. Any unauthorized miles will be docked from your performance bonus."

Alright then. Malicious compliance engaged.

I put the truck in park, turned on a podcast, and sat there. And sat. And sat. For four hours, the highway was a parking lot. Since it was an unusually hot day for April, the reefer unit (the cooling system) had to work overtime. Kevin’s "fuel-efficient" plan resulted in the truck idling for 240 minutes straight while the cooling unit sucked back more diesel than if I had driven 50 extra miles.

The fallout:

By the time I reached the resort, the cargo - nearly $15,000 worth of premium seafood - had started to soften because the reefer couldn't keep up with the extreme heat and the prolonged engine idling. The resort manager refused the entire delivery.

When I got back, Kevin tried to write me up for the loss. I simply handed my boss the recorded call and the timestamped logs showing I followed Kevin’s "statistically superior" route to the letter. Not only did the company lose $15k in stock, but they also had to pay me 4 hours of overtime for sitting on a highway doing nothing.

Word is, the "AI-optimization" policy is being "reviewed," and Kevin was last seen frantically explaining to the Regional Manager why his fuel savings report showed a massive spike in idle-time waste.

This happened at a retail job I had a few years ago. Our store manager, I'll call him Greg, had a habit of making verbal instructions and then completely denying he ever said them when something went wrong. Blame would always roll downhill and somehow land on whoever had actually followed his instructions. After watching this happen to three different coworkers in the span of two months I decided I was done being caught in that.

Greg announced at a team meeting that going forward everyone needed to "document everything, I don't want any he said she said, if it's not written down it didn't happen." He was annoyed because two employees had a miscommunication about a shipment and he had to deal with the fallout. Fine. Great actually. I took him completely at his word.

I started documenting everything. Every verbal instruction Greg gave me I would immediately follow up with an email: "just confirming your instruction from 2:15pm today that I should move the seasonal display to aisle 4 rather than aisle 7 as previously planned, please let me know if I have misunderstood." At first he didn't respond to them. Then he started responding with "yes that's correct" because ignoring a written record felt worse to him I guess. I have no idea. But he was building a paper trail against himself one confirmation at a time and he didn't seem to realise it.

About six weeks in he pulled me aside and told me to stop sending so many emails because it was "clogging up communication." I asked him very politely if he could clarify which types of instructions he no longer wanted documented, and whether he wanted that clarification in writing. He stared at me for a long time. He said nevermind. I kept documenting. Never got blamed for a single thing the entire rest of my time at that store.

so my old job had one of those physical suggestion boxes mounted on the wall near the break room, the kind with the little slot on top and a stack of paper slips next to it. it had been there for years and as far as anyone could tell nothing had ever come of it. suggestions went in, nothing happened, box sat there collecting vibes. our manager Linda mentioned at an all hands meeting that she wished people would "engage more with the feedback process" and specifically pointed to the suggestion box and said she reads every single one and takes them seriously.

I want to be clear that I did not set out to be annoying about this. I genuinely had suggestions. small things that had been bugging me for months, the scheduling software that logged everyone out every 45 minutes, the fact that the break room only had one microwave for 34 people, the printer that was technically working but took 11 minutes to warm up from sleep mode, stuff like that. I started writing them down. one per slip, specific and polite, no names, just observations and a suggested fix.

I submitted maybe 22 suggestions over three weeks. I know because I kept a copy in my notes app just to track if anything changed. nothing changed for the first two weeks and then Linda called a team meeting specifically to address "the volume of suggestions coming in" and said while she appreciated the engagement she wanted people to focus on "meaningful feedback" not "minor operational complaints."

I raised my hand and asked how we would know which category something fell into before submitting it and whether there was a guideline. she said to use common sense. I submitted a suggestion that we create a guideline for categorizing suggestions. I heard from a coworker that Linda printed that one out and stuck it on her fridge at home. not confirmed but I choose to believe it.

This happened at a marketing agency where I worked for about two years. We had a director, I'll call him Ron, who was very particular about communication and had a bit of a reputation for jumping into email threads late and then acting like he had no idea what was discussed, even when he was copied on everything. To combat this he made a new rule at a team meeting: everyone must cc the entire team on every email, no exceptions, so that nobody could ever claim they weren't informed about something.

I want to be clear that Ron meant this for client-facing updates and project decisions. That was obviously the spirit of what he was asking. But he said every email, no exceptions, and when someone asked if that included internal stuff he said yes, all of it, I want full visibility into everything.

So I complied. Fully. I cced the entire 14 person team on my email to IT asking them to fix my mouse. I cced everyone when I emailed the office manager to ask if we had more printer paper. I cced all 14 people when I followed up with a vendor about a invoice discrepancy for $40. I cced the whole team when I emailed Ron himself to let him know I'd be five minutes late back from lunch beacuse I was stuck in a slow elevator.

By day three Ron had received somewhere around 200 emails that had nothing to do with him. He pulled me aside and told me I was being ridiculous and that obviously he didn't mean personal admin emails. I pulled up the notes from the meeting on my laptop, showed him the part where someone asked about internal emails and he said all of it, and smiled politely. The rule was quietly revised to "project and client updates" by the end of that week.

I still cced him on the printer paper one for another month just to make sure he had full visability.

Before anyone gets mad at me, I know my grandma is old and is losing her mind. She has been exhibiting signs of mental decline since 80. I DO NOT HATE MY GRANDMA. Grandma is my dad's mom. Grandpa (dad's father, and the best adult figure I ever had for 12 years of my life) died when I was 12 and it really hurt Grandma hard. Like really hard. It hurt me too. I'm now approaching 30 (and feeling it). That's when Grandma started to decline in mental sanity. She has made it to 90! Hooray!!!

Malicious behaviors started popping up with Grandma only targeting me (a dude) for attention and it REALLY annoyed the middle child, an identical twin. Grandma will only look at me, even when the ENTIRE family is visiting grandma. Nobody else seems to notice that grandma will stare at me and wait until I look at her to shyly smile and look away like a hot girl getting turned on. Granted, she has been doing that since 80. I do NOT hate my grandma. the middle sibling is another story.

"Don't look down, Oberus, it's bad for your neck and posture." every time, regardless of what I'm doing, I must look STRAIGHT AT grandma. What do I do?

Starts pouring food out of a pan onto a plate where I HAVE to look down (it's below eye level). "Oberus!!! hey! look up, it's bad for your neck!" says grandma. I do just that I start looking right up (she purposely stands in my line of sight) and continue what I'm doing. Food starts missing the plate and spilling onto the table (but not the entire thing). "Oberus!! you're spilling onto the table!" grandma exclaims. Dad comes over to yell at me for being so careless. Hey, grandma told me to not look down and demanded I do so WHILE I was pouring it. So I did. Grandma is furious that I spilled food because I wasn't looking at it. Dad (her own son) yells at her FULL volume the same way he does at me whenever I break something. This repeats for 5 months until grandma is just tired of her own son yelling at her for this situation to cause a mess in HIS household.

If this doesn't comply, I will remove it

I have always done my fair share of the laundry, but I recently retired (wife still works part time) and am now expected to do it all.

And, since my wife “saw this somewhere”, she has decided to turn all of her articles of clothing inside out to wash (just hers, not mine).

When she does turn the laundry over, she dumps the entire contents of the dryer on to the top of the dryer and cleans the lint screen out, dropping the lint on/around the warm clothes. Then she moves on with her day.

When I fold/process the dried clothes, I have been folding and stacking them, then making separate plies for her to put away (her own clothes… I put mine away). She insisted on separate piles for her clothes (underwear, socks, shirts, workout tops, workout bottoms, pajamas, tops, shorts, pants, etc…)

Since doing the inside out thing and the half-assed lint thing, I now fold her clothes inside out… into four piles… tops, bottoms, underwear, socks. And stick the lint into some article of her clothing as I fold it.

I work deliveries for a local logistics company, mostly small electronics and home items. Most customers are fine, but some treat instructions like they’re absolute law… even when they don’t make sense.

One day I had a delivery for a pretty expensive home appliance. The delivery note was oddly specific:

“Leave outside side entrance, under blue sign near service gate.”

When I reached the location, there were three different side entrances and none of them had a blue sign anywhere visible. The place looked like it had been renovated recently, so a lot of old markings were gone.

I called the customer just to confirm exactly which entrance they meant.

He answered, already annoyed.

Before I could even explain, he said:
“I already wrote everything you need. Don’t call me for nonsense. Just follow the instructions.”

I tried again to clarify which side gate or landmark he was referring to.

He cut me off:
“Exact instructions. Nothing else.”

Alright.

So I looked at the note again:
outside side entrance, under blue sign near service gate.

After checking all sides, I finally found something that technically matched, there was a small temporary “blue” construction tag near a side gate that clearly wasn’t meant for deliveries.

So I placed the appliance right there, took the delivery photo, marked it complete, and left.

A few hours later, dispatch calls me. Customer is furious. He says I left the item “in the wrong place” and it was exposed and inconvenient.

But the instructions? Those were exactly what I followed. Word for word.

Manager checked the call recording, saw the instruction refusal, and just said:
“He told you to follow it exactly. That’s what happened.”

Next day, delivery notes system got updated to include:
“Customer must confirm ambiguous drop locations before dispatch.”

Funny how “just follow the instructions exactly” only works in theory.

Never thought I’d having anything to contribute here. Always loved the stories though. Turns out I can contribute now!!!

For some context I live in what people call a rural small town. And what others call a ghost town. We have a population of 500 people.. spanning 57 miles. If you don’t want to get price gouged by the one and only family owned grocery store the nearest town with Costco’s and Walmarts and stuff is an hour and a half away.

The population is mostly people who grew up there. Mostly elderly who spent their entire lives there. And their longevity isn’t… long anymore. Population is decreasing faster than it can be replenished. Haven’t always lived here. Not till I had my daughter and moved in with family. But pretty much everyone around here I have known since I was born. Unfortunately I was abused assaulted and taken advantage of by the man who owns the only store in town. When I finally spoke out I lost pretty much everyone they weren’t gonna make this man mad. Only a few people were on my side and helped me.

One couple the most. Let’s call them J and his wife T. They have always been the kindest. So loving so caring and helpful. We’ve spent a lot of time together over the years and they have a close relationship with my now 5 year old. They are snow birds so we only see them about 5-6 months out of the year. Last year they were the only two on my side and helped me with it all. J came to me one day and handed me a house key. Explained that I’m always welcome. That while they are gone I can use it as sanctuary. A place to go to have a minute alone. It’s only three houses away. He said no matter what I’d always be welcome and the next time I saw his wife T she said the same exact thing. We had a hard time parting last year. Tears were shed. Almost every day they sent me local job postings and check in and asking for pics of my little girl. Always asking how I was and I’d do it in return. I never once went to the house. It’s a beautiful place. Honestly could be considered a sanctuary. But I wanted to wait. I wanted to see them and enjoy the space with them. Two weeks before Easter they both texted and said we can’t wait to see you and your daughter we will be home Easter Day and can meet up at the house the next day.

So Easter came and went. I reached out. Suddenly no responses. No answers. Two days ago I reached out to J. I’ve been fighting for a position at the hospital daycare half hour away and after 4 interviews got it. Told him and he ignored it. Whatever. Figured they were busy settling in. Last night he simply texted me “enjoy the good life” I said thanks and expressed my excitement to reunite. And 7 am he texted me saying “if you’re not busy I’d like my house key back I’d like you to drop it off. at that point it all came together. For whatever reason I’m completely cut off. No explication. I know there’s two sides to every story but I’ve known them since childhood. Every word we’ve ever exchanged was love and support and hobbies and all that. I said ok no problem. I’ll drop it off tonight after work. I did infact drop it off. I put it in a tiny very tightly sealed container with a note.

So after work I drove down our back street. They were both waiting up watching we through. The window clearly expecting me to get out and bring it to them. But just as it said in my note. Hope this key finds you well. I have now DROPPED it off.

I did infact drop it off. Make sure to turn my phone flashlight on so they could see me DROP it off. The shock I saw on them through the window was priceless. I waited. Five minutes later got a text very angry he was. I didn’t bother to read it. Simply said “I told you I’d DROP it off and I did. “ and blocked him.

Maybe it’s not huge and mostly petty but… I do maliciously comply to his request.

Some background: I've been at this company for 10 years. Our department head has always been a micromanager of the worst variety like the kind who complains when you don't do things his way but refuses to tell you what his way actually is.

Last quarter, he pulled me aside and told me my expense reports were "sloppy" and "unprofessional." When I asked how he wanted them formatted, he got that look and said, and I quote: "I genuinely don't care how it looks. Just make sure every single expense is documented. Every. Single. One."

So I documented every single one.

The $2.40 parking meter I fed so I could run in and grab client documents? Documented, with a photo of the meter, the ticket stub, and a timestamped note explaining the business purpose.

The $0.89 pen I bought because mine ran out mid-client meeting? Documented. Receipt included. Cross-referenced with the meeting calendar entry to demonstrate necessity.

The $1.75 in tolls? Documented individually. Each toll. Separate line item. With the GPS route exported as a PDF attachment showing I did, in fact, pass through those tolls on company business.

My monthly expense report went from 1 page to 47 pages. I submitted it as a 14MB PDF.

He emailed me the next morning asking if I had "lost my mind", I forwarded him his own words back. He read them. There was a long silence on our next call.

He has since clarified exactly how he wants expense reports formatted. In writing. With examples.

I now have that email printed and framed above my desk.