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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/LemonSlicesOnSushi on 2025-05-11 02:30:27+00:00.

I’m not sure this exactly malicious compliance, but here goes:

As a military officer, it was required to apply to retire 12 months out from your retirement date. I was in what I would call a mid-level manager job. I had about 40 employees and we had a $500M annual budget for our program. My team was really great with very professional and competent people and rarely any issues. We performed really well. They would come to me with their issues and over time I saw patterns and we would fix them. For instance, one issue we solved saved the organization $64M over a four year period. We had a lot of other smaller wins (a few million here and there), but that was a biggie.

My boss, who was bucking for General, was a jerk. For lots of reasons, but just a sour and unhappy person. About 7 months from my retirement in the following spring we decided to move my spouse and kids to my home town to be able to start the new school year. We had a house and just needed to move and get setup. I asked for three weeks and the boss would only give me two weeks. That only gave us a week and a half to get my family settled after the four day drive with kids, animals, etc. plus the furniture and everything to arrive just two days before I had to be on a plane back. So I was salty. Game on! I was prior enlisted and knew how to play the game by the book. It is important to note that I only missed about ten days of work in 23 years due to illness.

Two things happened. No more multimillion dollar savings ideas that made the boss look good came out of my office and it was time for me to take care of stuff I neglected over the years. In regular meetings, when asked where the next savings was going to come from, it was always crickets.

I knew I needed surgery for an injury I had and had some other medical issues I had been neglecting due to work and just life. I planned to take care of all that post retirement, as it would give me time to recover and figure out what I would do for a living because we couldn’t survive on just retirement. Since my boss wouldn’t let me get my family settled, it was time to take care of all my medical issue.

I made medical appointments to get checked out for all my issues. I had two procedures that had me out of work for a week each. But the cherry on top was I got surgery the day before Thanksgiving and the doctor had me on convalescent leave for 4 weeks. When you are on leave like that, you have to have a form signed by your boss and it indicates the address where you will be taking that time to recover. Of course I used my hometown address so my wife could help me recover. Boss was pissed and tried to deny the leave. It went to our version of HR and they said he had to allow it. That made him even more pissed.

In the end, I got to spend the holidays with my family across the country and only had about three weeks left on the job before taking my terminal leave (that he could not deny) when I returned. I didn’t want a ceremony or anything, I just rode off into the sunset.