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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/CatlessBoyMom on 2025-03-20 18:50:39+00:00.

This one is my husband’s.

Hubby works in an HVAC department that covers multiple buildings. The department usually runs a crew of 5, even though they really need 6, so they all pick up overtime each week. This has long been an argument between their boss and his boss who thinks the crew is wasting time and shouldn’t actually need the OT.

Not too long ago one of the guys burned out and left. So the crew was down to 4 and boss’s boss decided that it was the perfect time to not only prove that the OT was unjustified, but that they didn’t actually need to replace the 5th crew member. How was he going to prove this, you might wonder. He wanted an email from each crew member detailing what they did and how long it took each day.

Luckily for the guys on this crew, hubby has spent many years dealing with adaptive technology. Namely text to speech and speech to text.

So the next morning when each of them started they began recording their actions. Right down to “removing screwdriver from toolbox. Unscrewing screw from bottom left corner of compressor access panel.”

At lunch, each man copied the text to an email (without cleaning it up) and sent it off to boss’s boss. At the end of the regular day they did the same with the second half of a normal day. Then they each put in 4 hours of OT. At the end of their OT they did the same again.

They came in the next morning to an email requesting that they not document their time any longer. A few weeks later they were training a replacement for their fifth crew member. They still don’t have the sixth that they need, but their boss no longer hears complaints about the amount of OT they each put in.