This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/HakanTengri on 2025-01-24 06:40:06+00:00.

This happened some fifteen years ago, but a recent post on here reminded me. I once worked in a municipal archive as an employee of a contractor company. As in, the city contracted the firm and they contracted me and a few other people to do the work. We had an abandoned cinema full of pallets, each with a mountain of file boxes we had to index and catalogue, since the archive had been unattended for something like 30 years. Of course, they gave us the shittiest contract they legally could and paid us literal peanuts for a high qualification job with legal responsibility, but I was young and needed the money.

So, our bosses got paid per job, but we got paid monthly. They wanted the job done as quickly as possible so they could take another one and started pressuring us to do a sloppy job in order to finish quickly. They were in a different city and their latest idea was to call us on the phone every day two minutes before our time to go to ask what had we done that day and pressure us. The calls would go for maybe half an hour, making us late. We were in a remote town with horrible transport connections and we didn’t drive, so if we didn’t go out on time we’ll have to wait hours for the next bus, plus an hour and a half bus ride home. I guess the idea was to punish us and hope we’ll go quicker so they won’t ‘need’ to extend the call to pressure us. BUT they didn’t want to admit to (I guess they legally couldn’t), so they just said they needed to be updated daily.

Cue malicious compliance: after the second time they pulled that shit I started spending at least the last half an hour of every work day pulling together a very tediously detailed (so.tediously.detailed.so.tediously) written report of everything we did that day and e-mailing it to them at precisely my clock-out hour. Then, when they called, I said ‘don’t worry, you have the daily update in your inbox, it took me half an hour, now it’s my time to go home, bye’ and hung up.

Of course, work got delayed by at least half an our each day, but what could they do? I was strictly complying with their request for information, in writing, and with every little detail so they don’t need to remember. And legally, in Spain, they couldn’t fire us without justification unless they canceled the project with the city.

They did call me back for a different project, but when they realized I wouldn’t stand for other shit they tried to pull they actually canceled the project and ‘let me go’. They had the gall to still promise to call me for another one ‘soon’.