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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Rick_B_9446 on 2024-02-10 20:25:38.

Spoiler alert: no dramatic ending; I just had fun with the situation. On with the story.

More than fifty years ago I got my first ‘real’ job in a hardware store. I was the guy who stocked shelves, cut and threaded pipe to sell in various commonly-used lengths, cut large sheets of glass into common sizes to fit picture frames, cut keys for customers, and so on (I just realized: there was a lot of cutting in this job). I had a pretty fun time as a typical teenage boy in a hardware store. The store had been founded years earlier by kind of a grumpy guy, but he ran the best hardware store in our area so we all shopped there anyway. By the time I worked at the store he’d given it to his two sons, who co-owned it AND co-managed it; both sons were equally in charge, which was of course a recipe for pandemonium. Oh, and the father, in his late seventies by then, would still come into the store almost every day and give employees orders as if he were still the boss. Fun times.

As soon as I realized there was no way to beat their awful management I decided to just do my job and enjoy the buffoonery, so cue malicious compliance by the fifteen-year-old stock boy. Whenever one of them gave me a task to do I did it cheerfully. Invariably one of the others would come up to me, ask what I was doing, and then tell me to do it another way. More cheerful compliance. When the one who’d originally given me the task asked why I hadn’t done it the way he’d told me to my answer was always, “Oh, I did it that way. When I was done [other brother, or Dad] told me it was supposed to be done this way, so I changed it.” Of course he’d tell me to change it back to the way it was REALLY supposed to be (according to him) and I re-did the whole thing just as cheerfully. Keep in mind I was just a minimum-wage teenager doing menial tasks in a hardware store, and I absolutely did not care which way might be ‘better for business.’ Their store, not mine, right? Hey, I did the tasks well, and cheerfully, so I was never called out for slacking or poor performance.

I wish this story had a great ending where my compliance led to some disaster, or even to some ‘Aha’ moment where they realized their procedures were ineffective and got better at managing, but that’s not the case; sorry. I just had lots of fun for a year watching the two brothers and their father chase each other around that store fixing the rolling sh*t show they’d created.

I actually really enjoyed that job.