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So it was my first job was a server at a very popular 24 hour breakfast diner/chain. We had lots of colorful customers.

One morning, I’m serving a woman sitting by herself. I ask her what I can get her, and she says she’d like an omelette. We have a list of pre-built omelettes, or you can build your own, so I ask her how she’d like her omelette. “Just a regular omelette, please” she tells me.

“Okay, so you don’t want one of the signature omelettes, what would you like inside of yours?” I ask

“Nothing, just a regular omelette.” She replies with a huff

I pause for a second because this order does occur, but not often. Some people like their eggs scrambled and cooked, then rolled up. “So you’d like an omelette with nothing inside?”

“YES! A plain omelette!” She snaps, now irritated that I’ve questioned her several times.

Cue malicious compliance.

So I enter the order, a 5-egg omelette with no fillings and no toppings. A few minutes later it comes out, and she is appalled. “What is THIS?!”

"Your plain omelette," I reply...

“But where is the cheese, or the ham or the onions?!” She is irate.

“Ma’am, you ordered an omelette with nothing inside...”

She gets cocky and says, “An omelette is eggs rolled up with ham, cheese, and onions! Everything else is extra! You should know this, working at a breakfast place!”

I look at her deadpan and inform her “Actually, ma’am, omelette is French for scrambled eggs that are fried and rolled or folded; everything else is extra.”

I’m busy so I walk off and help other colorful customers, meanwhile she flags down a manager to complain, who confirms what I told her and points out that in the menu there is, very specifically, a ham cheese and onion omelette with a large picture in the middle of the page.

Then tells her she has to re-order her meal and wait a second time.

She didn’t leave a tip.

TL;DR: A customer ordered a "regular omelette" and got annoyed when I asked questions about fillings or toppings. So, I put in the order for a 5-egg plain omelette. She was so irritated and complained to the manager who backed me up. She had to order again and didn't leave a tip.

[reposted from reddit]

cross-posted from: https://rabbitea.rs/post/280182

I think this is appropriate here!

> ‘I am a self-expressive person and I feel very confident with pink hair so I came up with a solution to keep the job and my hair’

[reposted from reddit - I am not OP]

I work at a store that sells kitchen appliances and other kitchen related stuff, normally when we’re supposed to leave or go on break we’re supposed to tell our manager, I was helping a long line at cash register and had already been there for 8 hours and assumed they had someone to cover me, I wasn’t allowed to use the walkies to ask to be covered to go home, so I quickly found my manager and told her my shift was done.

She got really prissy at me and said, “Could you really not stay a few more minutes?” I tried to tell her, “I thought you had someone to cover me I can stay if you want.” She then replied, “No no just go, but next time you need to wait for a manager to let you go home.”

record scratch

This was never a rule, I asked other people who’ve worked there for years and they agreed that it wasn’t a rule.

I worked again a few days later and the store was empty, my shift was over and was about to ask to go home then I remember what my manager told me.

Cue malicious compliance.

I continued to wander the store and slightly fix shelves, making sure I was near my manager.

After about 2 and a half hours she said, “You’re still here, why haven’t you gone home?” I replied, “You said I need to wait to be told to go home.” My manager looked at me as though she was mentally kicking herself. “Just go,” she said.

I clocked out and got paid an extra $30 for doing literally nothing.

TL;DR: My manager got so annoyed when I told her my shift was done that she said I had to wait for a manager to dismiss me after my shift. Well, the next time I worked I waited around for 2 and a half hours doing nothing waiting to get dismissed. When my manager noticed, she told me to go and that's how I got paid an extra 2 hours for doing nothing.

[REPOST]

There are a handful of rules to saluting in the American military. The when, why, and how is drilled into you from boot camp until the day you leave. Even the order in which the salutes are rendered have meaning. When it comes to vehicles there are helpful insignia and stickers to indicate if its an officer such as a colored sticker located on the front windshield.

My base was small enough where it was everyone's job at some point to do sentry duty at the front gate which had housing for military families. Sentry duty was pretty basic, you'd stop every vehicle, check IDs and then wave them through. If they were an officer you'd see it coming with those colored stickers and after verifying the identity of the officer, you'd salute and send them on their way.

One day while on duty I approached a vehicle with an officer's sticker and there was only the officer's wife driving in the vehicle. I returned her ID, wished her a nice day and waved her through. Pausing with a stern look, "Where's my salute?"

Now, Karen here was wife to a higher ranking officer and has clearly has fallen under the impression people are saluting her somewhere along the way. Some of the junior enlisted might've even been saluting her as they're more prone to f*ck ups.

I politely replied, "Ma'am salutes are only rendered to commissioned officers." Angrily pointing her fingers at the front of her windshield towards her husband's officer sticker, "I have a sticker and you need to salute the sticker." Curtly I continued, "I'm afraid that sticker is not an officer either."

Frustrated she pulled through and left my post. My cover guy and I watched her drive down the street and pull right into the administrative building with the top brass and huffed into the building as quickly as her body would take her. We exchange a look between us with wry smiles knowing exactly where this is probably going.

Later that day, we get a new official base-wide mandate. From here forward all enlisted will salute vehicle stickers of officers regardless of who's in the vehicle. Rodger that.

Cue malicious compliance.

It's worth noting that when you salute an officer as enlisted, you do it first, and you hold that salute until you are saluted in return and they lower theirs. Only then do you lower your salute. It signals that you're saluting them, and they're replying.

Additionally, when saluting a group of officers, you generally direct your salute and greeting to the highest-ranking individual. Now as far as I know this stupid sticker salute order has no accommodation for how a 2004 Toyota Camry fits into the officers pecking order. Additionally if the car is unoccupied, it's not like that sticker is removed.

After that order came through we all began saluting stickers. Personally, I'd direct my salute to the sticker. I would also prioritize sticker salutes over officers. Let me tell you, walking through parking lots was a blast as I saluted empty cars on my way to where ever. More and more people saw me doing it, and more and more people started doing it.

Not long after the order was publicly rescinded, which hilariously had the balancing effect of never rendering a salute to anyone but a clearly known officer cementing Karen never getting her unearned salutes.

TL;DR: Civilian wife demanded to be saluted because her husband was an officer, used her clout to get a rule enlisted ordering us to salute vehicle stickers. We all followed orders and saluted vehicle stickers, prioritized them over officers, and even empty vehicles in parking lots until the rule was rescinded, ensuring the civilian wife never got her salutes.

[reposted from reddit]

This happened several years ago when my ex and I were going through a heated divorce. While we were married, we had a couple of conversations about how rich people hide their assets to avoid paying taxes.

I've never had enough assets to do this, but she somehow got the idea that I was and told her attorney that I was laundering money and hiding income. It was more likely the heat of the moment as divorces often come down to. I couldn't even afford my own attorney so I represented myself.

Her lawyer wasn't a total ass, but he clearly was out to get me, and he talked down to me like I didn't deserve to breathe the same air. One day, I get a letter in the mail from him requesting an updated income declarations form and 3 years of financials. It had a long-ass list of things to include.

I own a communications tech company that was in super startup phase back then. Money was already tight. I was trying to get this business off the ground with no financing, I was finishing my MBA with scholarships and loans, so paying for copies and postage or driving this 30 miles to his office meant eating peanut butter and saltines for a week. So I called him to explain my situation. He all but called me a liar and didn't believe I couldn't afford it.

I was put off by that, and I said this was taking time away from business I needed to handle. To which he replied (and I'll never forget this), "Well, according to your income declarations, you're not that busy. What do you do all day?" He then said if he didn't get these documents, he would consider my previous filings as fake tell the judge, contact the DA, and also alert the state tax agency and IRS. Probably an empty threat, but I'm no lawyer.

Efax is one of the services my company provides, and at this time it was relatively unknown. So I asked him if he has a fax machine. He said he had a fax/scanner/copier device, then said what law office doesn't have a fax machine? And I suddenly got an idea.

Cue malicious compliance.

Okay, I said to him, I'll put together and fax whatever I can. You want 3 years of financials? You got it.

I scanned-to-PDF every receipt I could find. McDonald's receipt from 5 years ago? F*ck it, won't hurt to include it. CVS receipt? It's 3 miles long, perfect. They get the $1 off toothpaste coupons too.

I downloaded every bank statement, credit card statement, purchase orders from vendors, and every invoice I sent to clients. I printed to PDF the entire 3 year accounting journal, monthly/quarterly/annual balance sheets, cash flow statements, P & L's. Not only did I PDF 3 years of tax filings, but every single letter I received from the IRS and state tax agency, including the inserts advising me of my rights. It took awhile, but I was a few days ahead of the deadline!

I made a cover page black background with white lettering. Wherever I could, I included separator pages in all caps in the biggest, boldest font that would fit on the page in landscape: 20XX RECEIPTS, 20XX TAXES, etc.

I merged everything into a single 150+ page compressed PDF and sent the document using my Efax system. Every hour or so, I received a status email saying the fax failed. Huh, that's weird. Well, they're getting this document. So I changed the system configuration to unlimited retries after failures to keep redialing until it went through. Weird, I was still getting status email failures. I'll delete the failure emails and keep the success one after it eventually goes through, I thought. Problem solved.

Two days later, a lady from his office called and asked me to stop sending the fax. Their fax/scanner/printer/copier had been printing non-stop. It kept getting paper jams, kept running out of ink and they had to keep shutting it off and back on to print.

I explained that her boss told me to send this by the deadline or else he would call the DA and IRS. Since I didn't want a call from the DA or the IRS, I would keep sending until I get a success confirmation. I suggested they just not print until my fax completes, but she didn't like that.

She asked me to email the documents, and I told a little white lie that my email wouldn't allow an attachment that big. Unless her boss in writing agreed to cancel the request or agree to reimburse me for my costs to print and ship, I said I would continue to fax until they confirm they have received every page.

She put me on hold, and the attorney gets on the line. He said forget sending the financials. I said that I would need this in writing, so I will keep sending the fax until he sent that to me. He asked me to stop faxing and he would send it in writing, and I said send it in writing first and then I'll stop.

Long moment of silence... click.

About 20 minutes later, I received an email from his assistant with an attached, signed letter in PDF that I no longer needed to provide financials. The letter then threatened to pursue sanctions in court or sue me for interfering with their business. Every time I saw him after that, the lawyer never brought up financials again.

TL;DR: My ex accused me of hiding income and money laundering, so her divorce lawyer demanded 3 years of financials. I spam faxed them with my company's Efax service until they told me to stop.

[REPOST]

This was back in the '80s, my first job, working as a maintenance man at a local hotel. I'd been working there part-time since I was 16 and when I turned 18, I got a notice to attend jury duty. I picked a week and I let my boss know.

The owner of the hotel found out and sees me in the hallway and tells me that I need to do "whatever it takes" to get out of jury duty because he needs me at the hotel that week for a large dog show, and if I'm not at work, I'm fired.

When I get to jury duty, day 1, I get selected for a week-long trial, and the judge asks jurors if there's any reason we cannot serve on the jury. They go around... When they get to me, I'm nervous, never been in court before and too scared to lie.

Cue malicious compliance.

I tell the judge that the owner of the business I work at will fire me if I'm not back today and said I needed to do everything I can to get out of jury duty or I'm fired, other than that I'm fine serving. The judge looks p*ssed.

The judge has me approach the bench, asks for the name of the owner, location, etc. Then he hands the court officer a paper and says something to the officer. I'm told to return to the jury box. About an hour later (still selecting a jury), the officer returns with the owner, visibly shaken, in handcuffs and walked to the front of the judge's bench.

The owner is standing in front of the judge. The judge asks him questions which he apologetically tries to worm out of.

Then the judge instructs him that I will be here for jury duty, I will serve as long as I need to, and he should NOT do anything to retaliate against me -- and that the judge is filing charges and will be instructing the clerk to check with me regularly and if, for any reason, I am fired or face any disciplinary action at work - he will hold the owner in contempt, violation of a court order, and a bunch more legal stuff. He will spend time in jail thinking about how important jury duty is.

Then the judge makes him apologize to me, in court!

I made it onto the jury and I served the week. I reported back to work the following week. I expected some blowback, but I never got fired, none of my shifts were changed and I got paid for my time in jury - I didn't ask why I got paid.

The clerk did check back a few times and I was told to call the judge's clerk's direct phone number if anything happened. It was awesome, I was pretty much bullet-proof and worked until I saved enough to go back to school.

TL;DR: When I got my first notice for jury duty, my boss told me to get out of it or I'd be fired. Being the scared 18-year old that I was, when the judge asked if any of us couldn't serve, I told him what my boss had said. The judge had my boss dragged into court and threatened with jail time. I ended up serving on the jury and getting paid for the days I missed at work.

[REPOST] Many years ago, I worked at a car dealership. The attached service garage was small and I was the only licensed mechanic.

I would occasionally have issues with male customers— they would second guess my diagnoses, watch me while I worked on their cars from the bay door, double check my work in the parking lot, etc.

I didn’t deal with customers directly and would often get my apprentice to pull cars in and out of the shop for me.

This morning in particular, we were busy. The lot jockey and apprentice were occupied helping wash cars for delivery and driving to a customer’s house.

The service advisor left a work order and keys at the parts counter, and I went out the front through service to get the car. It was in for a service campaign, which was an update done with a scan tool. It takes about 10 minutes.

The customer was planning on waiting and was sitting in service. When he saw me with his keys in my hand, he immediately stood up, alarmed. I was hustling so I walked right by him and out the door. I missed the following conversation, according to the service advisor (also female):

Customer: “Who is that chick? Is she going to be working on my car? I don’t want her working on my car.”

Advisor: “The other tech is out at the moment, so it’s going to be quite a wait until someone else can look at your car.”

C: “That’s fine. I’ll wait for a guy. I don’t want that chick touching my car.”

A, politely: “Understood.”

Cue malicious compliance.

The advisor comes to let me know, and I pull the car out and put the work order and keys back on the counter.

Half an hour passes. The apprentice is still away, and I am happily working on something else, bringing other cars in and out.

The customer is now watching each and every person who comes through the door.

The high school co-op student comes in to get something signed. The customer’s keys are still sitting on the desk. It’s been about an hour now.

C: “Hey— why hasn’t my car gone in yet? Can’t you get this guy to do it?”

A: “No, sorry. He’s just a co-op student so he is not allowed to drive the cars due to liability and insurance concerns.”

C: “Just get someone else to bring the car in and he can do the work. This was supposed to take 10 minutes.”

A: “Sorry, sir. He’s just a high school student doing his co-op; he’s not approved to perform warranty work. Only licensed techs and apprentices can do the recall.”

The car jockey returns. The advisor hands the car jockey a different set of keys, and he brings yet another car into the shop for me. The customer is becoming incensed.

C: “I’ve been sitting here for over an hour and I’ve watched 5 cars go in before mine. My appointment was for 8am, this is getting ridiculous,” blah blah blah.

At this point he says that he literally doesn’t care who does the recall, but that it has to be a guy.

The service advisor starts listing off the names of the men who work in the dealership, then saying why they can’t perform the recall.

“Well there’s Harmon, but he’s just the car jockey. He doesn’t know how to work on cars. Then there’s Jeet, but he’s about 17. I wouldn’t want him doing the recall, personally. I guess we could ask Mike— but Mike is the parts guy— he doesn’t know how to use the scan tool. The detailers are men, but they know NOTHING about cars… ”

The customer is fuming at this point, and demands to talk to the service manager.

The manager comes out of his office, and guides the customer into the garage. He’s pretty old school… lights up a cigarette standing at the end of my bay, and points at me.

“That’s my best technician. Those guys take orders from her. You can either wait for her to finish what she’s working on, and then you can ask if she’s still willing to do your work, or you can take your car somewhere else.”

The guy was pretty shook up at this point and he took his car and left, two hours after he’d first arrived. I don’t think we ever saw him again, which was not much of a loss, all things considered.

That manager in particular ALWAYS stuck up for me and took my side. The service advisor has this very dead-pan sense of humour. She knew full well it would easily be an hour before the apprentice would return from his errand, and that no one else could do the recall.

TL;DR: A customer brought his car in to the shop but when he saw me with his keys asked for a man to do the job instead. The service advisor happily agreed knowing full well there was no one but me to do the job. The customer ended up waiting two hours before leaving without getting his car fixed.

[REPOST]

I work in a helpdesk hotline for an international company of around 50.000 employees. To understand why I felt such glee when our head of IT called about needing her password reset, I'll have to explain a bit of backstory.

We've been handling the 1st level servicedesk for all sites around the globe, mainly Europe, North America and Singapore for the better part of a decade now. As you can probably imagine, working in a contractor-based helpdesk (meaning we're not part of the actual company but instead are employees of the call center) will involve a lot of sucking up. New tools are introduced for the users to utilise but they're complete shit, borderline useless and lack features the old software had? Suck it up. Process is unclear, nonsensical or just plain dumb? Suck it up, you can give feedback, but we're sure as hell gonna ignore the heck out of it.

So after around 10 years of sucking up and working with what we got, our service department got outsourced to the cheapest competitor available. A real slap in the face against us. No helpdesk is ever perfect (especially since we’re all underpaid unmotivated IT grunts), but we always thrived to meet our targets and get work done. Subsequently, everyone hated the change of IT service providers, except for company treasury. Service quality plummeted, most of our guys lost their jobs and only half a dozen of us still work in our original jobs since the new IT Service is so ludicrously bad, our rampdown has been delayed for close to a year now so at least SOMEONE knows what they're doing and gets shit done in 1st lvl servicedesk.

You can imagine the jaws dropping when the architect for the whole IT restructuring got an award for her work in saving the company money (which they probably lost again due to every OTHER department having significantly more IT related issues that are just not being solved). It was no fancy, well-known award, but it involved red carpet and a gala. For basically ruining IT service.

So this award winning architect of IT-doom calls me this one night, because she's forgotten something basic: changing her password before it had been expired for too long. She is now on an important business trip to oversee the last regions we're servicing being converted to the new service provider. And now she couldn't get any work done, because she couldn't access her laptop.

As I mentioned earlier, the tools and processes we have to use are bonkers. Sometimes you could work around them. But in my case, I was too happy to tell her: "nope, I can not generate a new password for you since you haven't accessed the password self service tool before." Dumbfounded, she replied "What? You can not reset my password, because I have not accessed the password tool previously, which I now can not do because I don't have a valid password to access the tool with?" I smiled to myself as I continued: "Exactly that. Since we've lost our tools to reset passwords manually, the only other alternative is sending an automatically generated email to your manager, who will have to bother resetting the password for you." A realisation struck her then. These managers of hers...are all just one step below the CEO. They're in the executive committee, busy people. And I would need to send them an email, asking them to kindly run after the password reset for her to do her job. All because she ignored her frequent password change prompts. It was glorious. Sure, I still knew a way of resetting the password manually. But I sure as hell wasn't gonna put my ass on the line for that to happen. Wasn't allowed by the process, too. "Isn't there any other person you could send this mail to?", she asked. And I confirmed, sure, I could, to the manager one step above that. Which would mean the CEO himself.

She was not amused.

She refrained from threats, but when customers ask for your name with clenched teeth, it's usually not because they're smiling so hard. In a frantic tone, she declared all of this process to be nonsense (nonsense we had to work with over the last 7 months, so yeah, no shit) and all but ordered me to send her the password manually to her private phone number. To which I calmly replied, miss, as head of IT and processes, of course you know I'm not allowed to do that. In addition to not having the technical means." The rest of the call was fairly straightforward. She'd promise to send me a mail with an exception authorisation so I could reset the password for her in particular. to which I told her if that's what she intends for us to do: set passwords for anyone claiming to be head of IT and almost threatening me. I mean, I know it was her since I knew her voice as our head of IT's and the phone number matched, but still. After a bit more skirmishing she brought up the "YOU'RE REFUSING TO HELP ME" argument to which I countered the only possible thing left for me to do is open a ticket for the 2nd level and have them figure out a way to get her a simple password. She ended the call angrily soon after.

The ticket about getting her a password is still not resolved by the way. Guess we're not the only department with a grudge against her.

[REPOST]

My father died on Father’s Day 2012. He was divorced and living alone, and I am an only child. So that means that I had to wrap up all of his affairs. This story centers around us trying to get his utilities canceled.

I called in to see what we had to do to get them to cancel. The lady I spoke with on the phone said to send in his certified death certificate. I sent in the certified copy of his death certificate the next day. The next month got another bill. I called again and a new woman answered. She said that because I wasn’t on the account that she had to speak with the account holder. I informed her that the account holder was dead but she wouldn’t budge. I had to make an appointment with a supervisor so she could speak to him herself in person.

I showed up at the board of public utilities with another death certificate and HIS ASHES IN THE CLEAR BAG that they returned his remains in. I plopped them down on the center of her desk and said when she talked to him to tell him that I loved him for me. The woman went pale, flew out her chair, and called the cops.

When they showed up she claimed that I had assaulted her. And yes my dads remains were still sitting in the middle of her desk with the death certificate. The cops questioned me as to why I would do that. I told them the story. The supervisor’s boss was called in and they all stepped away from the desk for a private talk. While they were talking the cops came over to talk to me. They said that I shouldn’t take human remains out in public, but there was no laws that were broken. I said that I agreed with them that it was extreme, but she insisted to speak with him in person. By then they were done talking between themselves. The supervisor’s boss kissed up to me and got it taken care of.

But the story isn’t over yet! I had to call back a few days later to get utilities back to the house in my name. When the person on the phone saw the address and my name, I was immediately put on hold. The supervisors boss that finally helped me got on the phone. She sucked up to me and waived all of the fees that come with setting up utilities. Just as the call was ending, she informed me that she was again so sorry for the employees lack of compassion. She said that the employee was terminated and again she is so very sorry.

TLDR: Ignorant employee asked to speak to dead dad. Had a meeting in person, brought his ashes, got her fired.

[REPOST]

Happened this morning. Even though I made a complete and full stop at a 4 way stop, I get pulled over by a police vehicle, lights flashing, the works. I turn my dash cam around to face me and whomever goes in front of the driver side window.

I roll it down and ask "what seems to be the problem officer?" Officer looks at me the way one would look at a sticky piece of gum stuck to the bottom of one's shoe. "You didn't make a complete stop." he says. I adjust one of my hearing aids (lost part of my hearing due to being a touring session musician previously) and before I could speak, he firmly orders "Sir, take off your earphones when I'm talking to you!"

I take both hearing aids off and look at him. I can read lips a little but we're both masked so I can't understand what he's saying. I communicate in sign language simultaneously while speaking verbally "I'm deaf and I didn't understand what you just said. Can you communicate to me in ASL (American Sign Language) please. He points at my hearing aids that look like Apple Air Pods, motioning me to put them on. I respond "Yes officer, without those I can only communicate in ASL. Please instruct me in ASL and I will be compliant in every possible way".

He looks at the dashcam that's neatly pointed squarely at us and mumbles "For fuck's sake". He then motions for me to to go, giving me 2 thumbs up. Needless to say, I rolled up the window and drove away as fast as legally allowed.

Couldn't wipe the smile off my face all day, Lol.

[REPOST]

As part of the plan to return to office post covid, my company has done a lot of re-designating of who can permanently work from home, who can hybrid, etc. I really wanted to work from home full time. I hate the office with a burning passion - it's distracting, it's a long commute, there's no benefit to being there, so on and so forth. I'd just rather be at home.

Well when we thought May was going to be go back to office time they started giving out the new designations. I got designated as in office full time. It made no sense to me. I work on a team of 8 people and each of us is in a different office somewhere in the country. I've literally never been to an in person meeting or needed to do in person work in 3 years at this company. Every single other person on my team got designated to work from home. So I brought it up with my boss and asked to work from home. When I started at this company and lived elsewhere I got to work from home for 4 months before I moved and the past 14 months during covid have been at home, so 18/36 months at the company have been WFH. What I was told is that I go idle too often in chat to trust to work from home.

Basically we have a company wide IM system that shows you as available, idle, or in a meeting. If you don't touch your keyboard for 5 minutes you show as idle. So they've decided to use this as a measure for who is working and who isn't. The thing is, like many people in many types of jobs, I don't have shit to do for a full 8 hours every single day. The amount of work I have to do on a typical day takes 3-5 hours of actual attention. There simply isn't something to do ALL the time. My performance numbers actually went up working from home, by all objective KPI numbers I'm a better worker at home. In fact, in the KPIs that I don't flat out lead the team in, I come in second. There isn't work to do that I'm neglecting or procrastinating, when something comes up I simply do it until it's done or until I can't do anymore due to waiting on someone else then stop. And I've done that method long enough that my work queue stays empty because I worked to get my queue down to the point where when something comes up I can immediately address it and be done with it. But because I have other ways to spend my time in down time instead of messing around online at my cube pretending to be working meaning I show idle more often, I'm a worse worker apparently. I was told if it weren't for that they would let me work at home.

So I wrote a 6 line powershell script that virtually inputs the period key every 4 minutes that starts running every day at 8am and stops at 5pm. So now I literally never go idle. I do the same amount of work and still read books, watch tv, and play video games on the side. But I have a shiny green check next to my name all day.

Because of covid complications they eventually said no going back until after labor day. I just had a meeting with my boss and he said over this time they've noticed I go idle a lot less than I used to so they're changing my designation to work from home, all because of a little icon in some software. This concludes my TED talk on why low to middle level managers are the dumbest, most useless do-nothing positions in all of corporate America

EDIT: I do not need to be told to buy a mouse jiggler for the 30th time. I'm aware of what they are. This cost me no money and achieves the same thing. Why would I pay to achieve an effect I've already achieved for free?

EDIT 2: A lot of people are understandably asking for the script:

$dummyshell = New-Object -com "Wscript.shell" $dummyshell.sendkeys(".")

That's the backbone of the whole thing. There's different ways to implement it with for loops or scheduled tasks or whatever, that parts up to you, but that's all the powershell needs at it's core to accomplish this. A lot of people have pointed out that sending Insert or F13 instead of period would be better so change that up if you want.

To all the people commenting that I'm a shitty employee and obviously trying to insult me over it: I wish I could make you feel just how little I care. To all the people implying a work day isn't valid if you aren't at 100% capacity from 8 - 5, keep it up, you truly are an ideal employee...to them. Enjoy the taste of leather, bootlickers

Edit 3: Some of y’all would be pissed as fuck if I explained the concept of firefighters to you

[REPOST]

I worked at a company that gave out exorbitant amounts of vacation. Anyone who worked there for 25+ years received 8 weeks of vacation and 2 weeks of personal time. This was a family owned company, but rather large. We ran 3 shifts totaling 250+ people.

Enter Jimmy. Jimmy was a grissled old man, he started at the company when he was just 20, now he was 63 and gave absolutely zero shits. Jimmy also knew how to make a specific part for our product, him and one other higher up in the office.

One day the plant owner comes out and announces he's selling to a corporation. He's older and ready to retire, he promises that there will be very little change and wishes us all well.

The new company comes in and immediately goes after many of the great benefits we had. The first thing they do is cut everyone's max vacation down to 4 weeks, and do completely away with personal time. Anyone who's maxed out had until December 31st of that year to use it up, and they wouldn't pay it out. They then go into the office and clean house, firing anyone who's close to retirement. Including Jimmy's back up.

But they also do away with one very important rule. You no longer have to get vacation approved, you can just call in and take it.

Jimmy is pissed, and they know it. They realize he's the only one in the building that can do his job now. So they hire a new kid for him to train, most likely to permanently replace Jimmy. So Jimmy does what anyone would do. He calls in the first training day for the new hire, and lets us know he's going to use all of his PTO at once, and promptly takes 10 weeks off.

We had a back stock of parts he had made, so it wasn't too unnerving. But for 10 weeks, Jimmy went and applied to other jobs, found one, and started.

Fast forward 10 weeks, Its the day Jimmy is supposed to return. He doesn't. For two days they try calling him, and even go to his house. He's nowhere to be found. Finally on day three he calls and resigns, and they lose their shit. The parts he makes are specialized and patented by the original founder, you can't just hire someone off the street to make them. What eventually happened was they had to contract the original owner to come in a teach some new hires how to make them, and when he found out what all they had done it pissed him off. The last I heard he charged them a 7 figure contract to teach them how to produce the parts, and they had to pony up, or close down.

Moral of the story, don't fuck with people's vacation time.

Edit: Jimmy made and electronic control module that was sealed and stayed fixed in a poured unit made of a two part epoxy.

Edit #2: Jimmy didn't exactly "Miss out" on a seven figure contract and had zero chance to take one. He left, said fuck em and moved on. When they contacted the previous owner and explained the situation it was basically a "you need my help? It'll cost 1mil." Type of conversation.

[REPOST]

Several years ago I worked front desk at a privately owned hotel (non-chain) that had been a Days Inn five years prior.

The only way to book a reservation was to talk to the front desk staff. No online reservations, no third party reservations. About 50% of our rooms were sold to walk ins.

One holiday weekend we are booked full. Our elderly elevator is having some trouble with all the traffic and spooking guests so I close it and call for a repair man but it's 10 o'clock at night so I'm not expecting anybody until the next morning. All of our guests are checked in, our accessibility rooms are on the same floor as the lobby, so I'll just help out anyone with their luggage if they have more and put up a sign saying so.

In walks a woman I don't recognize from check-in. She plops a piece of paper in front of me and then goes and gets lots of luggage. The paper shows her with a reservation at Days Inn at this address for tonight for a tenth the price we were selling before being fully booked. She comes back to the desk likely thinking that I have been checking her in all this time.

"I regret to inform you that we do not accept third party reservations; we are unfortunately are already booked for the night"

"I have a reservation! It's right there! I paid good money for it!"

"Ma'am, I believe you, unfortunately you are not in our system because we don't take third party reservations. They sold it to you fraudulently."

"You are just trying to steal my money! I have a confirmation number right there! I handed it you."

"Yes ma'am you handed me a reservation to a Days Inn. We are [hotel name], gesturing to a sign"

All of the signage inside and outside the building is correct.

"Also, this is for a fourth floor room, we only have three floors."

"I stayed at this DAYS INN last year on the fourth floor!"

This argument continues for a while with me keeping my cool, informing her that we are booked, all of our rooms are full, me insisting that we don't have a fourth floor, not Days Inn, don't take third party reservations, etc. Eventually she screams at me that I am going to take her to her room on the fourth floor, that she paid for, right now! I don't respond, just stare at her with a blank face until she slaps the desk and screams "Now!" again.

I don't mime making a room key, but I do grab my huge key ring and we both load ourselves up with her excessive luggage and climb the stairs. Once we get to the third floor I gesture to the third floor sign and tell her it is the third floor. I then use my maintenance key to unlock the door to the maintenance stairs which are not lit and she trudges up behind me not saying anything. I open the floor to the tarred roof and walk outside. "and here is the fourth floor, I hope it is as nice as the last time you stayed here" I drop her luggage and go down the stairs back to the front desk.

Honestly, had she been nicer to me I would have tried to help her get a room at a different hotel and submit documentation to try and get her a refund (or charge back) from the third party but since she screamed at me I left her and her luggage on the roof. Plus, she insisted she had stayed on the fourth floor, so that's what she got.

EDIT: There was an option at the bottom of the stairs to go straight outside inside of coming by the front desk. I didn't see her again and she wasn't there when I went to lock the roof back up on my midnight rounds.

[REPOST] Years ago, I was the CTO of a software company that was perhaps the worst run company I've ever seen. It was run by a "chairman" who used to be a flight engineer, and who had no experience at all in the software industry. One day, in his expansive wisdom, Mr. Chairman decided that we were going to give his friend (a local pastor) an office. I was ordered by Mr. Chairman to make it impossible for anybody ("Even you!!!") to access any of Mr. Pastor's files (because, y'know, privacy and stuff). I attempted to point out a couple of problems with that scenario, but was immediately shut down and ordered to do what I was told.

Now, this particular person had... well, let's call it a quirk. When anything went wrong with his computer, his solution was to format his C: drive. (Yeah, I know...) The inevitable happened, and Mr. Chairman ordered me to restore all of Mr. Pastor's files from the backup (which we normally did... ahem... religiously). I looked at him innocently and said "What backup?" It took possibly five seconds for steam to begin pouring from his ears, and for him to start screaming, "YOU MEAN YOU DIDN'T DO A BACKUP??? WHY YOU....!!!!" and so on. I waited for him to finish, and then asked him politely how he proposed that I do a backup of files that I'm not allowed to have any access to? The silence that followed was glorious.

[REPOST]

The car accident was of the side impact variety and it was brutal. This was in the days before airbags and seatbelt laws. One second I'm driving and the next I'm halfway out the passenger window watching blood run off my head to pool in the glass of a previously closed window. Another second ticks by and I'm in the ER receiving thirteen crude stitches for eleven inches of wide open scalp. I lost more than two pints of blood and a large patch of hair. I also lost my favorite white fishnet t-shirt, but that's a separate tragedy.

That Friday of a Labor Day weekend was how my name shows up in the newspaper list of "Labor Day Weekend Accidents." Tuesday comes and I go to class at the local college. Being a teenager gave me the gift of immortality. There I was, fully ambulatory, just four days after a serious car accident. For the sake of propriety, I'm wearing a hat to cover the fresh injury. It was a whitePanama hat with a bright 80s style hatband. As this was 1983, everything was 80s style, but that's a separate tragedy.

Hobbling along, I make it to Sociology just as class was beginning. I take a seat at the back of class and settle in.

The conversation went something like this:

"Excuse me? Could you remove your hat please?" The teacher had her own sense of propriety. My hat didn't fit with proper classroom attire.

"I was in a car accident," I replied.

Did she hear my words or was one of her rude students muttering another in a career-long list of excuses? Likely the latter was the case.

"Take the hat off. You cannot wear that in my class," indicated she was not happy with my hat. Not at all.

Well, okay then.

Off comes my hat. Roughly a third of my hair had been shaved off. The wound was pink and puckered. The seam had a line of dried blood in it. The wound began an inch beyond my missing hairline and continued back, branching into a 'Y' shape. The surgeon's instructions were to keep the wound clean, dry, and unbandaged. Lucky for all in attendance, my mother had washed my scalp the previous day. She used the word "gore" at some point to describe what was washing off.

Imagine you're one of my classmates. Whatever you would say at that point would be something I heard from my classmates and friends.

"Ahhh, you can put your hat back on," said the teacher.

Not before a little malicious compliance, I won't.

"But I can't wear hats in class," I replied. "I mean, I can do it, but not if I'm breaking the rules."

"Please put your hat on."

"Okay. If you insist," and the hat went back on my head.

My advice is not to engage in malicious compliance on the first day of class. Not in a course where the teacher gives essay questions. That was the only 'C' I received that semester, but that's a separate tragedy.

[REPOST]

This is a little long. Sorry.

When I was in college, I worked for a mobile carrier in a mall. For a young person, it was great money. I was the assistant manager, which was a fancy way of saying I was in charge of most of the store paperwork.

[A few months before]

One morning, I opened by myself and a guy approached me asking for a specific phone and kept balking at the price, asking if I could "cut him a deal though". I was confident we were BY FAR the cheapest in the area, so I told him "If you bring me a better deal, I'll be it!". The guy does another lap, talks to other stores, and comes back. "Come on, there is nothing you can do? Can I just get a case?". I smile and say, "Sorry that's the best I can do today, but can I get your number in case we get a sale that brings the price down? (This sometimes actually did work). His entire demeanor changed and he handed me paperwork out of his bag and showed me his Id. He was from corporate LP (loss preventions). Apparently my store ranked top in the state for "excessive discounts" and "excessive waste". He then hands me a document showing all of my "friends and family" discounts. So I flip open my phone (YES IT STILL FLIPPED) and showed him all the names on the list are in my phone, thus ARE friends and family. He thanks me and says he'll stick around to talk to my boss and one other team member.

Since smartphones aren't really a big thing at the time, the LP guy starts talking to me about my job, and I ask him a little more about what exactly flagged our store. Turns out the other two people he wanted to talk to had more than 30% of their transactions marked with that discount code and our store seemed to "lose" lots of inventory. Store practice was that if you open an accessory and it was damaged in shipping, you just throw it away and grab another one. Turns out there is a process you need to follow. He showed me the form and said "you really should be between x and x a month to be considered average.

He then interviews my boss and co-worker who couldn't prove that their discounts were accurate and they were let off with a stern warning. From then on, I took on the responsibility of tracking inventory and warning the team when we were getting close to the monthly limit. Like a miracle, cases stopped breaking for the rest of the month with these announcements.

[Fast forward]

I open by myself again one morning. I older gentleman approaches me and starts screaming at me about being a "heartless bastard" and asking "how the hell can you do this to people?!". I look at him puzzled. "Sir, I have no idea who you are, so you can't possibly be mad at me specifically. Lets go sit over there and have a quick chat". As soon as we sit down I look at him and he starts crying and shaking. "I don't know what to do. I'm gonna lose my house". He goes on to tell me his son had gotten 10 "free" phones from my store and the monthly bill was roughly $800 plus tax. "sir, if your son started an account with us, there is nothing I can do without him coming to the store." The dad shows me a photo in his wallet and explains that his son lives in a home because he's too old to take care of him. He's visibly disabled. He was already barely getting by paying for his house plus his son to be taken care of. My heart dropped as I figured out what had happened. My co-worker had sold the phones to his son while they were on a "mall outing" with his group home.

Furious, I go back to the store and void the entire order. I instruct the dad to bring me every phone he can find. Anything not in the store that day would be marked as stolen. I write up the inventory report and mark all of those phones stolen for the time being.

Co-worker comes in and I say, "don't bother clocking in. I saw your order from last night. Just know that it's voided. If you pull ANYTHING like that again i'll make sure you're fired. Take the rest of the weekend off". He argues for a moment, but leaves.

25 minutes later (and early for his shift) my boss shows up saying he heard what happened. I show him all of the paperwork and explain what I did to solve it. Irritated, he looks at me and says something like "you know you can't do that right?". He then argues with me that I had no right to void the order and "the contract was the contract". Confused and angry, I say "look, I will not sit by and allow people to be taken advantage of like that". To which he replies, "If you don't like the way we do things here, you can leave." Shocked, I walk back into the store where he tells me HE is taking care of all of the paperwork to "fix" my mess. Quietly I rip up my inventory report with a smile and tell him i'm leaving for the day.

I call a friend who said, "why don't you just get an IT job (what I was going to school for). He then calls a recruiter and sets up an interview for the next morning. Boss's little push gave me the drive to just go for it. I nailed the interview and get the job. My now ex-boss texted me shortly after and said "Hey OP, you're late." to which I replied, "no, I don't like the way you do things there". Silence.

[Fast forward a few months]

Both the boss and the co-worker were fired for theft. You see, with the unexplained "missing" phones and with no one watching inventory, LP quickly took interest in the store again. Turns out the "broken" cases were actually team members GIVING AWAY inventory to close sales. So when I was there "balancing" inventory and giving warnings, it was letting them know just how much they could steal and get away with it. Without me there they just did whatever the heck they wanted. From what I hear, they were escorted out by security and all.

So in the end, I was pushed to start the career of my dreams. They have a record.

Thanks for sticking with me, sorry it was so long.

[REPOST] I used to be an assistant golf course superintendent. One day my boss had me spraying chemicals on the fairways.

As I was spraying, some of our employees were having an issue with their machine. I stopped to help them and my boss pulls up and starts flipping out on me saying if I'm spraying fairways, that's all I need to be doing is spraying fairways. Not anything else. Okay, no problem.

A couple weeks later, the exact same scenario happened. I was spraying and some employees needed help. I ignored them and just kept on spraying. Their machine was broken down for nearly half an hour in the middle of the fairway during play before my boss rode around again and saw.

He came up to me livid and was saying that if I'm spraying fairways and I see someone needs help, I need to be able to break off and help them, that's part of being a manger.

I told him I didn't understand, because two weeks ago he explicitly told me to ONLY spray and reminded him of how he got mad when I did exactly that. He just stared at me for a second and then drove away in his golf cart. He came back a few holes later to apologize and says he did remember telling me that, and from now on I should just use my best judgement. uh-duh!!!

[REPOST]

Back in the 1980's I worked for a sporting goods company as a catalog designer. Small company, privately owned. I was the entire advertising department. I created four catalogs a year - these were responsible for most of our mail-order sales (pre-internet) to the tune of around $700K a year.

We sent the catalogs via bulk mail using a mailing service - this let us send them for a much discounted rate. To do this required the use of a bulk mail permit, and placing the permit info on the mailing area of the catalog. Technically it's called a "fiche."

Enter a new boss, call him Ron. I was #1 - the only one - in my department. For some reason the company owner hired Ron as a favor to a friend. From day one he was micromanaging, questioning everything, and screwing up my very tight schedule. This was BEFORE computers were common. EVERYTHING was by hand. Literally typing out copy and reducing it on a photocopier to fit. Developing the photo film myself, making prints, etc. The actual printer had to add screens to the photos so they'd print, burn metal plates, and so on. All time consuming and expensive. Deadlines could not be missed. So I was stuck with several 16 hour days come crunch-time.

I was complaining to the owner, but he really couldn't care less. I really wanted to stick it to Ron and the opportunity presented itself. Constant threats of "my way or you're fired" were getting to me. The latest pre-summer catalog was done (summer was our BIG season.) I had to give him my mock-up (photocopied sheets stapled together) of the final catalog for his approval - a new step added after he demanded it. He looked at it and sent it back with several pointless revisions. And a note to remove that "ugly permit box" because it was not needed. Where he worked previously stuffed their mailers in envelopes - the envelopes had the fiche, but their mailer did this last step. I simply asked him to initial the changes as this was the final approved version and was going to the printer the next day. There was no time to check it again. So he did. I knew it would be a total mess and it's something I would NEVER would have done in the past.

50,000 catalogs printed and shipped directly to the mailer. The day they arrive at the mailer the boss gets a call from the sales rep. "We can't mail your catalogs." Boss storms into my area of the building and is literally screaming. Ron is now pissed and yelling at me, joined by the boss. I swear - spittle and froth, vein bulging screaming. Minimum two week delay, wasted money, lost sales. I explain what happened, the threat to fire me, and showed the owner the changes to the final copy. Initialed by Ron. He was going to give Ron a 2nd chance until the bill came in from the printer. They had to stamp 50,000 catalogs by hand. We had to rent their permit, since that's what was on their stamp. Rental and labor was almost $8,000. Adjusted for inflation that's $20,000. Plus our early summer sales boost was off by almost $50K from previous years. Or $200K adjusted for inflation.

Ron WAS fired. I was left alone after that.

[REPOST]

Way back in the early 2000's I found myself working freelance as a result of the dot com implosion.

I found a gig sub-contracting for a contract a large company in San Diego had acquired from another company. They wanted to build a reliable delivery platform for the cell network. In those days cell data was 2G & 2.5G at best, so this wasn't as easy as you might think.

The division of the large company ran a satellite message platform, and the CTO of that division had no interest in this project, which is how I ended up with it.

Interestingly enough in the dot com implosion I had been let go by a company building a VAN overlay on the internet, a very similar problem. Since the second version of a product is always better I just took the lessons I learned and applied them to this project.

That included heavily relying on this "new thing" called open source software. It took my small team about six months to build and deliver the platform and both the customer and the sales people were very happy with the result. But the CTO of this division was not.

He had turned down the project based on his assumption that it would be a long and arduous task. So he demanded a code review with me and my team. He was very explicit, he wanted to see every line of code in this project, and we were not to leave anything out. He was sure we were somehow faking our results and was going to "get to the bottom" of this, as there was no way we could have delivered in six months.

So we assembled our source into a zip for him. First the code we wrote. Then all the source for the open source libraries we used. Then the source for the libraries those libraries used, an so on recursively until we everything. We ran all that through a formatter (to make it easier to read) and ended up with about 800MB of source files. Which we sent off to the CTO.

The initial code review date got moved back, and rescheduled for a month later. We sat in the meeting waiting for him, and he arrived about 15 minutes late. He stood in the doorway and looked at us and finally asked his only question - what did we use to pretty print the source.

I started to say we used a script we wrote but he cut me off, said fine and left the room. We ended up doing work for that large company for 10 years and never again were we asked to a code review.

[REPOST]

This happened a little while ago, but I still think about it sometimes.

I was a supervisor of a small team (who were great at what they did) and one payday had three worried staff members thinking payroll had cocked up and given them too much money - they hadn’t.

One of my guys came in 5 minutes late and got “caught” by one of the other managers. Who told my boss and it got round to me.

“I want you to check their clock ins and clock outs and let me know so we can dock them any time they weren’t in on time”

Now - I don’t care, they were a great employee, got a tonne of work done and always stayed late if they needed to finish things off. Also - I don’t want to even think about if that was legal or not.

It didn’t sit right with me.

Two things weren’t in his favour right now - one - he was being a tool and two - I’d already got another job lined up which he didn’t know about. So I didn’t care.

What next? I did as I was told and I checked. Couple of minutes here or there, nothing major. I then checked all of the extra time they worked since they’d started and added it all up. Made sure to take out anything they’d already claimed as overtime. Logged it in the system and approved and sent it over to finance myself.

Then I checked my other guys times as well and did the same thing.

Turns out - my guys were damn helpful, and helped out other areas when they could. The Overtime went over certain time limits and tipped over from 1.5 times pay to 2 times pay.

It added up to a lot.

I delayed it a couple of days to make sure it all went through and double checked with finance to make sure all was good. Then I called a meeting with my boss to let him know everything and hand him a letter.

He was not pleased.

Worth it.