This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/spadeslingger on 2024-01-19 03:29:23.

Wasn’t sure where to post this. First time poster long time lurker. A little background: My father never properly learned to read and write. He came from a dysfunctional home, but that’s another story. He was however very good at fixing cars. He worked at a junkyard since before I was born, I’ll call this junkyard A. A lot of times he would offer advice or even fix the cars of the customers on his own time as a side hustle. Another thing about my dad is he knew everybody. Anywhere we went people would always stop him and speak to him (mostly asking about a problem they are having with their cars). It didn’t matter where we went even on vacation across the country he ran into people he knew. The junkyard he worked at was originally owned by two brothers. They were good bosses and he made a decent wage and had very good health insurance. They made good business there and my father was the “Senior Sales Specialist”. Business was so good they bought a new location and built a new building and moved there. A few years later the business was sold to a guy named Dave. Dave was alright although we lost the health insurance, he stayed there for I’d say 8 or 9 more years. One day out of the blue Dave fires my dad and said it was because he didn’t have enough “technical skills”. He couldn’t hardly read or write but he could use the computer one handed to search the system for parts while on the phone with a customer. He and two or three other guys would be in the front to help customers and my dad’s line would have two or three people waiting especially for him and would refuse to be waited on by someone else. So he came home and filed for unemployment. He stayed home for maybe three weeks and was offered a job at another junkyard that was located between the city we lived and the next city over. Now comes the malicious compliance. Since my father was so well liked and everyone knew he got a raw deal from junkyard A they also switched businesses. All his longtime customers and friends now frequented Junkyard B. Many used card dealerships had “deals” with my father for the junk cars they sold for parts or parts they needed for fixing their used cars. All these businesses also switched junkyards and followed my dad to Junkyard B. This was a devastating hit to junkyard A’s business. So bad in fact, they ended up selling the business to the owners of Junkyard B. As soon as the sale was finished my dad was sent back to junkyard A where he worked for the rest of his life. He actually died in the junkyard. Massive heart attack. The funeral was so full of people there was not enough room for everyone in the funeral home. His funeral procession (the line of cars that drive uninterrupted from the funeral home to the cemetery) was over an hour long due to so many cars. My mom went to buy the plot next to his a few days after the funeral and the lady working there said she had been working there for over forty years and it was one of the largest group gathered for a funeral she had ever seen. He may not have been able to read or write very well, but he knew cars and he knew people. A lot of people.