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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Marinaisgo on 2024-07-31 20:24:22+00:00.

This happened many years ago when I was a field organizer and I ended up with a manager who had explicitly said she didn’t want to manage anybody, but a series of events meant I was her direct report.

In our initial meeting, I went over everything I’d been doing up to that point, where to find my weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual reports, how to keep track of where I’d be, and how to give me feedback between our monthly check-ins.

She was not used to working with field organizers and was shocked that I wasn’t going to be in the office except for meetings and to turn in my reports. And it’s fine to not know things, but then she went and said “if you’re not in the office where I can see you, how will I know you’re working? You could be doing anything you want and I’d never know.”

Over and above what kinds of assumptions that makes about my character, whether or not someone looks like they’re working is a terrible metric for measuring what work is actually getting done. But I kept that to myself. Rather innocently, I offered to have my task tracking app send her an email whenever I accomplished a task. She agreed.

The thing about me is I am a fast worker. I always have been. It’s been a bone of contention with people who I work with. I create backlogs. I make other people feel weird about how much they do in a day. I used to get upset about this and wish everybody was as fast as me. By this time in my career, though, I learned to keep it to myself and spend some portion of my day pacing myself with others, or to find jobs where my pace wasn’t that strange.

This job was the latter. We were doing underfunded community driven work where the failure or success of a project sometimes meant that the people we served couldn’t pay their rent or afford food. So I was blazingly fast.

After 3 days of hundreds of emails a day notifying her the second I completed a task, my boss decided that she actually didn’t need to know whether I was working or not.

We actually became good friends after that because we realized we had a lot in common and we teamed up against the other bosses who kept making shitty decisions and putting us in bad places because they knew we were both competent enough to solve their problems for them. Neither of us work there anymore, we’ve moved on to much better things, but we’re still friends today.