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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/TheMobydickler on 2024-05-17 13:27:43+00:00.
True story regarding the beautiful emerald Isle and petty revenge on an overbearing newly promoted boss. Apologies if it’s a long read.
This beautiful country of ours has a fairly low population density generally for reasons dating back to the infamous famine. (Watch Black 47 for reference). It also however has layer upon layer of civil servants and bureaucracy. We have a beautiful system of government where we have 2 houses and a representative for every 30000 people as a fact of law. Underneath that we have a local government system with Local Authorities in each counry and city, each with their own elected councillors and administration. Planning, fire safety and roads are administrated by these local councils which leads to the public service being the largest employers in the country. All in an island with a Southern Republic that has with an area of 26,000 square miles with at the time about 31 or 32 local authorities and a population of 5.5 million plus or minus. It’s totally over the top but that’s a discussion for another day.
Anyhow, while working for one such local authority as a Senior Executive Engineer (SEE) a Fire officer, my good friend, (an extremely intelligent civil engineer) had the misfortune of being gifted with a new boss, a spanking clean, brand new in box, County Engineer in his first role in that position. Full of the proverbial P**s and Vinegar.
Now this particular county was landlocked by other counties and is a particularly odd shape with a brand new motorway going through it. There are many parts of the county that the only way to get to by road is through other counties.This is important.
Most staff used their own cars and once a month you filled out your mileage sheets, sent it to your direct line manager for sign-off who sent it up the chain and claimed it back at a rate of so much per mile. It was often a nice addition to the paycheck and more than covered the cost of maintaining and running the vehicle. If you crossed your LA’S boundary you had to fill out another sheet explaining why and get it signed off by your line manager.
Under their previous boss, they had devised a system where no-one had to bother with the mileage sheets necessarily on a monthly basis and could let it slide for a few months and then submit them all together and get a nice bonus in one lump, nice if you had a special occasion or a holiday coming up. An easy savings plan if you will. No-one bothered with the second sheet because you crossed the boundary so many times a week that they became irrelevant.
Cue new boss’s arrival who insisted on doing everything by the book. Didnt like the way that things worked previously and was going to sort it all out, straighten out everything and kick everyone into line.
He called everyone into a meeting, explained what he was doing in his best authorative manner and insisted on monthly submittal of all expenses and mileage sheets and everything listed down to the finest detail including reasons for your trips etc. And they HAD to be explained fully and in detail otherwise the mileage sheets would be sent back unsigned.
My friend and the rest of the staff went away from the meeting wondering how they were going to deal with this new way of working. After a few days stewing my friend came up with a solution to the issue and then called his workmates, they had a little discussion amongst themselves about how to deal with things and came up with a plan for petty revenge.
Everyone under the direction of the new boss found that the extreme ends of the county is where they were needed to work that month, the staff then slightly redesigned all of their trips so that they crossed county boundaries multiple times a day, six days a week.
At the end of month 1, this plan culminated with the submission of thousands of permission confirmation sheets to cross the county boundary to be signed by the new CE after his first month. It took him over 4 weeks to get through that batch and on week 4 after receiving the second month’s batch, all the senior staff were called into a meeting, the agenda of which was kept very hush hush.
The only thing that ever came out of that meeting was a quiet word from the senior staff that everything was going back to the way it used to work.
A perfect teaching moment and petty revenge combined.
TLDR: New broom Boss makes changes to the paperwork systems in place, staff get revenge for losing out on an unofficial simple savings plan by complying with absolutely every requirement and he ends up under a paper mountain his first month. Everything goes back to the way it was after 5 weeks.