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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/vrtigo1 on 2024-04-03 01:00:11.

My employer was a medium sized business (approx 50 employees at the time) and I happened to live right across the street (about 3/4 mile) from our office.

Shortly after I started working there, they asked me if I would mind being listed as a contact for the burglar alarm since all of the facilities / admin people lived pretty far away and I was right across the street. They said any time the burglar alarm goes off, someone has to drive over to meet the police. Don’t ask me why, I don’t really understand the policy. At the time, I was a young naive recent college grad and figured I would try to be helpful and told them I didn’t mind.

Our internal company policy was if you accidentally set the alarm off, you immediately call the people on the alarm company’s list, in order, so they know it’s a false alarm and they can tell the alarm company to ignore it.

At the outset, this worked pretty well. I’d get a few false alarm calls a year but I’d always get an apologetic call from the employee that set the alarm off so I would just tell the alarm company to ignore it.

Then the company started growing and we started having more and more false alarms as we had new employees that would forget about the alarm, and then we started having employees that would ignore the policy and would just leave after setting the alarm off without notifying anybody.

After I got wise to this, I started telling the alarm company to ignore everything even if I didn’t get a call because we started getting charged false alarm fees and I figured there was a 99% chance it was a false alarm. I figured we shouldn’t waste the time of the police or waste company money paying false alarm fees. I brought this up in a meeting with our COO and they shit a brick and insisted that we couldn’t ignore alarm events because what if someone really did break in and somebody was working late? They could be at risk. So I said, OK, staff need refresher training because they aren’t following the policy to notify me of false alarms, so we’re going to have a ton of police dispatches for false alarm events. COO minimizes the issue and insists the current policy is fine and no retraining is necessary, so cue malicious compliance.

Anytime I got an alarm call without someone notifying me of a false alarm, I followed the policy and had them send the police.

There were two or three false alarm calls where the police showed up, found nothing, and sent us a bill.

The very next call, I sent the police like the policy said and right as they were pulling up, they saw a vehicle pulling out of the parking lot and chased it. The employee that got chased? Yeah, it was the CEO. In addition to getting chased, he ended up getting cited for speeding as well.

The next day, COO tries to pin this on me like it’s somehow my fault, to which I reply “I just followed the policy you gave me”. The next day the entire company went through refresher training on alarm procedures and I was taken off the alarm call list. I count it as a win.