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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/BarryTheBarstand on 2025-05-09 13:08:13+00:00.

Many years back I was working in an office for a company in one of their satellite sites. In general, for your day to day, you only needed to use one system as it did everything that you technically needed. But it didn’t do everything you actually needed.

Now I was an older employee and was there before the new shiny bespoke software got rolled out, which meant I had login details for the old system which was still the backbone of half of our head office work and fed into what we saw.

This was really useful as it meant I could login and access loads of information that we actually needed, information that some faceless exec had decided to exclude from the new system. So for the next three or four years and I would log in every couple of days and download a report or two, giving us buying reports, stocking issues, and more, that I could then share with the rest of our site. It wasn’t confidential information, and while we could do without it, it definitely made life easier having it. Think of it as the difference between getting a drink in the middle of the night with the lights off… But it’s a damn sight easier with the lights on.

Anyway, we’d never had an issue and no one had complained, until one day one of the department managers found out I was downloading reports from a system that she was adamant that only her team needed to use and she contacted IT and had them revoke my access. And annoyingly, she did so without letting me know, which meant when I logged in the next time… Well, I didn’t and just got an error message.

Locally we had no idea what had happened, so a quick email to IT and got told that Karen had had my access blocked. So, then it’s a quick email to Karen to find out why and all I got was a short and curt “you don’t need access, if you need to know something you ask my team.”. I figure there’s two reasons for this, one being she’s a power hungry pain in the arse that likes to control people, and two is she’d been trying to expand her team and I guess if you make 20 satellite stores run through her then you create the workload you need to take on two or three more people so you can give your best friend flexible working hours… Allegedly. Oh… three reasons actually, she really hated me after I called her out once and humiliated her in front of the company directors, to which she lodged a complaint to HR demanding I be fired, only for the CEO to tell them to withdraw it as I hadn’t done anything wrong after I named him as a witness to the event.

So… malicious compliance time. Those reports I downloaded, granted it was only two or three reports, and only two or three times a week, which doesn’t seem like a big amount, but those reports helped resolve 50 plus complaints and enquiries per day. So now, I guess we have to email her team each time.

I told the rest of my team to run every query through me and I would email her team. One, because I didn’t want anyone else to get in trouble as I knew this was going to make her explode. Two, because I could field the queries to make sure each one was unique as we did get duplicate info requests and if they’ve told me once I didn’t want to upset them by making them tell me twice. And thirdly, because I’m a dick, I wanted her to know it was me.

She managed a week. By day three she had contacted my manager to complain, and by day five (because I hadn’t stopped, we still needed questions answered) she had a meeting with HR and I got a “cease and desist” request, asking if I could send a single email at the end of each day with all the queries in. It turns out, if you email six people up to 50 emails a day, at some point someone misses an important invoice and a whole shipment gets delayed, or worse, gets cancelled.

The upside… Within a couple of months, her team was “restructured”, with different members being given regional coverage. Turns out, the reason her team looked so busy is because they would count one job done by one person as being six jobs, one for each person because they were all included in the same emails. Turns out you don’t need a bigger team if you’re honest about the work they do. And secondly, the reports I downloaded, each person in her team now has to download them themselves twice a week and send them out to the stores in their region. The other stores had just decided that now they couldn’t find out, there was no reason to know, and answered queries with “I don’t know” for years, so we accidentally made their services better too.