Monday, October 12, 2020

Boss Denies Employee's Necessary PC Upgrade, Malicious Compliance Ensues


It's funny how that works out. Sometimes the people who truly aren't the tech savvy ones assume that they know everything about how the technology is supposed to work. In this case though, it's nice to see that the boss didn't end up being a total monster, and if anything, by the ending it was nothing but nice wholesome vibes. 

1.

Text - r/MaliciousCompliance + Join u/Rhelyk • 11h Won't get me a much needed PC upgrade to properly do my job? OK, I'll make you watch me work XL I run the parts room at an independently owned auto body & collision repair shop, we'll call the owners Mr and Mrs Bossman. We do mostly insurance repairs and always have between 20 and 50 vehicles on-property in various states of repair, depending on how busy we are. Once the estimate for a specific vehicle is approved my job is primarily to order al

2.

Text - person there who knows you can just google a problem and somebody has usually already posted the answer on a message board from 6 years ago. I complain a lot, but in actuality I very much like my job and l've become exceedingly good at it over the years. My coworkers are generally pretty great, there's almost no office drama, I don't usually deal with the general public and the owners are mostly solid bosses, a husband and wife team. Mr Bossman runs the day-to-day shop and he is there on-

3.

Text - actually anger her. She's not a Karen in the slightest, she's just an elemental force of nature and you can bend like the reed or break like the twig. So I deal with Mr Bossman on a daily basis and only deal with Mrs Bossman a few times a week when she needs something for accounting. My default work ethic used to be set to sack-of-potatoes, but that doesn't fly with the Bossmans and ESPECIALLY not Mrs Bossman. I have learned the hard way to be very, VERY proactive in my duties, which is d

4.

Text - send an email beginning with "per our phonecall, l'd just like to remind you...". ALWAYS have an email, saved my ass so many times, (becomes relevant later) and she freaking loves me because I have become exceedingly excellent at making her job easier through diligent bookkeeping. As you also might imagine, doing all this ordering and invoicing and emailing and such demands heavy use of a computer, and for years I had to make-do with one that was never built nor intended for the task. It

5.

Text - foreman to occasionally check estimates. At any given time I had to run our estimating software plus 2 to 4 pricematching programs (and their accompanying background scanning programs) plus multiple Chrome windows for email and parts-vendors and parts-finder websites, plus image software to view repair photos or edit diagrams to email back and forth. The budget computer had 2 gigs of RAM and a dual-core 1.3Ghz processor, it could barely handle running Notepad if

6.

Text - you had the main estimating software running, and it made my job PAINFULLY slow, even at the best of times. For 4 years l'd mention it to Mrs Bossman and it was always "oh right, I keep meaning to look into that" and then nothing, but that was better than bringing it up with Mr Bossman. Mr Bossman was a former repair technician before they opened their own shop together, so anything on the office end is already good-enough until it breaks and not worth wasting more money on in his eyes, a

7.

Text - Mrs Bossman had been going back and forth with a specific vendor that was arguing against some outstanding credits and unpaid invoices that didn't match our numbers, which means they don't match my numbers, so she came into my office to ask me to look into them as normal. But today is not normal, it's especially busy and I'm already a day behind where I should be. Queue Malicious Compliance.

8.

Text - This time I decided that unlike normal, my workload was light enough (HA!!) that I totally had the time right then and there and could look them up for her right on the spot instead of bringing here the files later that day, this seemed urgent after all! So I began searching our database for the problem invoices, and very deliberately and thoroughly went through every program I possibly could, opening every estimate and reconciliation and digital footprint to pull up any scrap of even-sli

9.

Text - anew, each new refresh taking more of those long-form time-dilated seconds to complete, those seconds that drag on and on and on like waiting for a traffic light to turn. I was just being properly diligent, you must understand. "Oh, here it is" l'd say in my most-matter-of-fact perfectly-normal everything-is-fine-and-standard-and- typical voice. "yeah, that part was returned back on...huh, oh let me pull up the credit memo...oh, y'know actually that just shows when I generated the return

10.

Text - She kept her smile up, but I could tell it had shifted and she was getting annoyed "Does it always take you this long to look up the invoices?" | could tell she was getting really impatient, but she couldn't say anything about it since I WAS doing exactly what she'd just asked of me, and she does normally love that l'm this thorough, so long as she's not waiting in realtime. "Huh? Oh yeah, this is normally like this," I said casually, "it's kinda frustrating sometimes but Mr Bossman doesn

11.

Text - I continued doing this for all 5 or so problem invoices and honestly, it WAS a 100% typical thing to look up and really only took maybe 15 minutes total in the end. The only difference was making a big show of it while intentionally making it look like I wasn't making a show of it, but that was enough. "Well, I really think we need to look into getting you a new computer, this can't be good be good for production turn-arounds if it's always being this slow" Huge success. Storm of Fury suc

12.

Text - properly tracked on our end, vendor's accounting had to admit the feth-up had been on their end and we had been billed in error. I'm not always right, but even when I'm wrong, I can usually pull up a time-dated email to make it look like I wasn't wrong. Bend a little, and The Hurricane may just pass you by for a less-prepared target. She waited a few weeks to find a good deal, but sure enough I had a new computer shortly thereafter that is MUCH more capable of running everything I need to

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