Employee maliciously complies after being accused of fraud, manager gets fired.

Veteran employee maliciously complies with new power hungry manager and gets him fired.

irritatingfarquar writes:

I worked for a water company for 25 years and was one of their most productive repair crews, that is until the new manager, let's call him Mr. Numbus, started.

We had a monthly rotation where you were on call for one week out of every four, responsible for emergency repairs outside of regular hours.

On the day in question, I began work at 7:30 am on a Friday and finished at 3:15 am on Saturday morning, which was quite a long shift. When I returned to work on Tuesday morning, Mr. Numbus called me into his office and informed me that, according to my vehicle tracker, I had left the yard at 3:12 am, not 3:15 am.

He accused me of attempting to defraud the company. Needless to say, I was furious at this level of nonsense. I told him that at the time, I was covered in mud and sweat, and after completing a grueling shift for the company, I simply wanted to get home. I asked if he was genuinely making a fuss over a mere 3 minutes. He responded by saying that I could potentially be fired for it.

That's when I decided to engage in malicious compliance. I informed him that if we were going to be this petty, he could remove me from the emergency contact list for extra coverage. Furthermore, I wouldn't start 20 minutes early each day anymore; I'd clock in at exactly 7:30 am and leave at exactly 5:30 pm, with no deviations.

I told him that he could explain to his superiors why productivity was declining and why it was becoming increasingly difficult to find coverage for emergencies. I wanted to show him how insignificant those 3 minutes were when they started costing the company money.

At that time, I didn't realize that Mr. Numbus' job was bonus-related and tied to our productivity. After I took my stance, productivity plummeted because other work crews followed my lead, except for the brown-nosers, of course.

Three weeks passed, and there was a complete mess with customer service complaints about delayed work. My productivity dropped from 7 jobs per day to 4. Mr. Numbus was summoned by his superiors to explain the chaos. He tried to spin a story that I had turned the entire crew against him for no reason, and this was the result.

Little did he know that I had trained his boss when he first started with the company 15 years before. The boss had wanted to understand our work and experience the hardships of the job, so he spent a full month working on the repair crews before returning to the office.

The boss called me in to find out the real story. I explained how Mr. Numbus had misused the tracking system to monitor the time I left the yard and how I had estimated my finish time, erring on the side of caution by 3 minutes because I was utterly exhausted after a challenging on-call shift.

In the end, the manager was let go for misusing the tracking system, which was only supposed to be used for emergencies, not for monitoring employees. Additionally, our on-call system was reviewed, leading to a reduction in the hours we were required to work.

Do you agree with the top comments from the post?

not-rasta-8913 says:

When will new managers learn not to screw with veteran employees? Probably never.

dertwo says:

I like that. His bosses actually sound like the kind of person that you would want to run a company. How many times have we heard that "if only my boss knew what was actually going on here"? His bosses actually did, and gave you the respect that you deserved.

CrittendenWildcat says:

That power move turned into an out-of-power move for your boss.

Do you have a similar story about a power hungry manager?