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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Manglewood on 2024-04-30 07:24:42.

Around 2008 I was a radiology assistant in a mammography unit - meaning I was the person who ushered in patients, showed them where to put their belongings, gives them the gown and instructions. Another part of my job was keeping the radiology station clean and tidy so that work surfaces were clear and sanitary.

Around this same time “The Secret” was huge and my co-workers were all WAY into it. For those who don’t know, it is a ridiculous pseudoscientific method pushed by Oprah Winfrey that promised you can get whatever you want simply by visualizing and asking the universe for it. The ugly side of this fairy tale thinking is that if bad things happen to you it’s your fault because you invited it by putting bad energy out into the universe. I found it wildly inappropriate that health care professionals believed that breast cancer victims had caused their own cancers through negative thinking. I fought with a few of the radiology techs about it but I was completely outnumbered so I tried to just keep my head down, focus on patients, and do my job (which included tidying up their O magazines, Secret books and other Secret-related materials so that they would leave strewn all over the counters).

Since they all hated me for not being in their Secret clique, they decided to hang up on me and go to the managers with complaints about my attitude. I was called out of work into a disciplinary ambush meeting where I explain my side of things. One of the higher-up managers totally agreed with me and actually defended me, but at the conclusion of the meeting I was told not to touch anyone else’s stuff because there were complaints that I was “shoving magazines into the corners” and threw away someone’s copy of The Secret (I really wish I had but I actually did not do that - it was a complete lie).

So by complaining about me, my idiotic co-workers effectively took away the part of my job which was cleaning up after them. I was no longer allowed to touch their magazines so they piled up two inches deep on every surface, plus empty bottles and yogurt containers, used napkins, cafeteria trays, popcorn detritus, and all sorts of other trash. The work station looked like a landfill. They would be absolutely seething about it and glaring at me but I would sit there reading, happily doing absolutely nothing about it since I wasn’t allowed to touch their stuff!