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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Illustrious_Log3261 on 2024-05-22 11:37:30+00:00.

So, my wife is having some issues at her work with multiple people of different levels of management telling her different things to do depending on who’s the manager on duty at the moment. I said she should do what the acting manager told her to do and when another manager came on duty complaining about what she was doing to relay what the previous manager had told her and to let them work it out. I also said that she should document everything so that she could relate it to HR if it became necessary to do so. I then explained to her about ‘malicious compliance’ and what it meant.

This started me thinking about an incident at my old job at a manufacturing plant about 12 years ago. The building had two areas: A production/packaging area, and an attached shipping/receiving warehouse. The production area was air-conditioned/heated. The warehouse was heated, but only had roof exhaust fans and no AC, so it got pretty hot in the summer, but was bearable (we just moved slower). On end of Friday we closed all the dock doors and shut off the exhaust fans and close the overhead door that separated the warehouse from the production areas (during the week the overhead was open but had those plastic flap strips you could drive a forklift through to keep the cool air in production). One Friday the newish manager, who spent little actual time in that building, told us that we should keep the fans on and the separation overhead door open during the weekend to keep the temperature cooler in the warehouse. Why he cared I really can’t fathom. We tried to explain to him that with the dock doors closed the roof fans would simply suck all of the cold air out of the production area, but he blew us off with the standard, “You will do as I instruct you to do”. So… cue MC. Monday comes that morning in July and it was hot as hell in the production area. The warehouse was the same temperature as always, and the coils on the production AC units had frozen and we had to have people to come out and service them.

All the manager had to say was, “Keep that separation overhead door closed at all times!”