Man maliciously complies with managers request by cleaning instead of serving patrons.
The service industry is thankless. Customers will treat you poorly, and sometimes your managers will too. That's why you can hit peak schadenfreude when you find ways to maliciously comply with your manager's request if you listen to what they're telling you to do, and they suffer for it.
On a popular Reddit thread in the Malicious Compliance Subreddit, one worker complies with a manager's request that he thought was 'disrespectful.'
He writes:
I’m a twenty-year-old male who works at a popular restaurant in a snobby area. My main job is to assist the servers in any way I can so they only have to worry about sweet-talking the customers.
I do all the heavy lifting for them. Whether it's cleaning their tables or taking their drinks and food to their tables, I'm doing it, and all they have to focus on is making the customers laugh. They get tips ranging from 17 to 40 dollars per table while I make 8 dollars an hour and get treated poorly; enough backstory, cue the malicious compliance.
My manager came up to me in a, I'm better than you mood and told me to DEEP clean the floors, ice makers, walls, trash cans, and racks and to not come to the front for any reason. I'm very annoyed at this because none of those things are my job duties, we have staff that deals with all the back cleaning, so it didn't make any sense to have me do it; these tasks would've taken me an hour and a half max. Still, I felt a bit cheeky and decided to clean the back deep until it was spotless.
About thirty minutes later, the same manager came up to me and told me that four tables needed cleaning, and two other tables had just got set, and I needed to bring their drinks to them; I looked at this man with a stare of a 20-year-old that has no bills to pay, and I said no I'm not done cleaning he looked shocked and responded angrily you can finish later they need help. I countered with no, it's filthy here. We don't want a health inspector to walk into this filth, do we? He storms off like a toddler that didn't get their candy.
Two hours go by, and I'm on my hands and knees scrubbing as If I was working for chef Gordon Ramsey himself; the same manager comes back again with a smirk and says wow, this looks like it's going to take you all day long maybe you should come to the front and help the servers since there's a huge Sunday rush I replied with you know, you might just be right and I go back to cleaning he storms off again.
Fast forward to two mins before my shift ends. My knees, legs, and fingers are all aching from cleaning, I shuffle my way to the front, where my manager has been waiting for me, and he says you finally decided to come to help, huh and I look at him without saying anything and clock out. Then I told him sorry; I'm not clocked in; I walked out to my car while he was blowing my phone up. I didn't care. I had five days off back to back, and he couldn't fire me since I did as he told me to. The story's moral is don't think you are better than someone with nothing to lose.
The internet is sending their thoughts and prayers.
w1987g says:
'I looked at this man with a stare of a 20-year-old with no bills to pay.' I miss that feeling...
slappymcslappers says:
You're getting shafted in many ways. In a restaurant with tipping, people help the servers get tipped out. That's you. The busser and food runner and barback. If they're giving you only an extra dollar per hour, something is majorly wrong.
humanneedinghelp says:
He can’t fire you because if this is what one day of you doing something productive but not your job (because the boss man said so) looks like. He can whine all he wants, but he’s not going to sign up for five days of that sh*t or, more likely, 30+ days while he tries to find someone who will accept $8/hr and ultimately gives up and has to accept his new way of life. Maybe the real petty revenge would just be to get a job elsewhere that pays twice as much
Schadenfreude is both a satisfying word and a satisfying feeling in the workplace.