rSlash - r/Maliciouscompliance How I made $1,900,000 by Complying

Episode Date: April 29, 2022

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to our slash malicious compliance, where OP gets paid $900 per hour. Our next Reddit post is from Manoni. I've got a fun shipyard story that I thought people might enjoy. So by this point in my life, I'd moved to another city and became a tugboat captain. I eventually built up my business enough that I had two boats and three guys working for me. It was a difficult business to keep functioning, but I did my best. We primarily did ship assist work and shifted did ships around in various yards. A did ship is a ship that isn't currently crude up and running, so it's unable to move around
Starting point is 00:00:34 by itself. Anyway, one of our customers was a great big shipyard that was constantly shuffling things around. They had five dry docks, a dozen cranes, several thousand feet of pier, it was a pretty big show. Well, this shard was in the habit of moving boats around on pretty much a daily basis. We would get told, boat A needs to be under crane number 6 at 7am, or boat X needs to enter dry dock number 4 at 9.30am. Things like that. The problem was that nobody there coordinated anything with each other. The superintendents barely talked to the shop foreman and the foreman didn't care what each other were doing. So we would keep getting these orders that just didn't make any sense. If we did
Starting point is 00:01:16 exactly as told, things would take all day, so I'd say, hey, so if we do these in a different order, or if I delay this by 10 minutes, then everything will work out a lot more smoothly and we can get out of here and quit billing you. Because keep in mind, this wasn't our only customer. We had other yards calling who needed their own work done, so to keep everyone happy, we had to try to be as efficient as possible. Well, this was fine and things operated along these lines for many years, with me being the de facto coordinator.
Starting point is 00:01:46 One day though, they hired this new yard superintendent, the boss of the whole yard, who in the space of just three weeks, royally screws up everything. This guy calls me up as much as you can with a subcontractor and tells me to keep my nose out of it and to do as I'm told. I say, you got it boss, and honestly, that was probably the greatest day of my life. I went back out to my boat, climbed up to my wheelhouse, and spent eight hours doing two hours worth of work. I figured this was going to get real expensive, real fast, and once I turned in an invoicer to, someone
Starting point is 00:02:22 was going to raise hell. Here's the thing though, no one ever did. Ever. We were told to do job A first, then do job B. Well that's fine and all, but if we do it in that order, then we have to wait around for 5 hours because the B boat is in the way of the A boat so we can't even get to the A boat. So we would just sit around for 5 hours, at $900 an hour for 2 boats. It was ridiculous.
Starting point is 00:02:47 It got to the point rather quickly where we get all set for the next part of the job, and then just shut down the engines and relax. This went on for 15 years until surprise, surprise, the yard went out of business. I should mention too that this isn't how I normally roll. I can't stand dragging my feet on purpose. In this case though, I had to stop and say, Christ, no one appreciated my help when I was helping, and they don't even notice that I've stopped. So why am I cutting my own income if this customer doesn't even seem to care? Hold up, I've
Starting point is 00:03:20 got to do the math on this. 900 freaking bucks per hour, times eight hour workday. That's $7,200 per day. Okay, how many workdays in a year? 260 times 260 is $1,872,000. That is a lot of money. Oh my God, that's a lot of money. They were paying OP roughly $1.8 million a year to just sit around and do nothing
Starting point is 00:03:50 for like six hours of the day. Awesome, that's amazing. Also, he said he did it for 15 years, what's time's 15? $28 million, no big deal. Just an easy $28 million, no big deal. Our next reddit post is from Wonderful Touch. So years ago, I was doing a summer job working for my mom as their secretary. She's a doctor.
Starting point is 00:04:09 I never looked much like my mom and nobody knew that I was her daughter. Patients just thought that I was an intern or student. During one summer, this mean old lady came to the office every two days. Not to actually see my mom, but just to sort of hang out in the Secretary's office and chat or ask for test results or whatever. But mainly just to spend time and complain about everything. The usual Secretary often indulges her because she's a regular, but she was away on vacation and I was the only one that she could talk to, and talk she did. She was racist, anti-everything, a hypocrite, and above all, like I said, just plain mean. I would always put up a facade with her, be
Starting point is 00:04:53 polite and smiling, and she seemed to love to teach me about life to a young girl like me. One day, she decided to talk very badly about her doctor, my mom. She thought that I was new and that I didn't know my boss very well, and she was bolder than usual. She said all sorts of horrible things about her, trying to spread rumors about her carelessness or bad practice. Then she asked me a medical question about her test results. Very sweetly, I ask her if she wants me to call the doctor to ask the
Starting point is 00:05:25 question since I'm not allowed to look at her file. Oh no, don't bother, the doctor never answers her phone, she just doesn't care. I said, but your well being is important, you should have the answer you're looking for. Let me try. If she sees her secretary number on the phone, maybe she'll answer. So I picked up the phone and called her. When she answered, I looked the old lady in the eyes and with my biggest smile I said, hi mom, I just had a long and interesting conversation with Mrs. D and she has some questions. Could you come talk to her? The face of this old hag when she just realized that she talked trash about the doctor in front of her daughter was priceless.
Starting point is 00:06:06 It was my favorite memory of that summer. My mom said to me that she didn't come back for three months and never talked again in front of any secretary. Beneath that, we have this story from Captain Seniors. My parents, who were English, went on vacation and they were allocated a table at a hotel that they shared with a couple of Dutch ladies. Every meal the ladies greeted my parents in English, all sweetness and smiles. But then they reverted to Dutch and proceeded to slag off my parents and other guests. They thought they were safe because who speaks Dutch, right? What they didn't know was that my
Starting point is 00:06:40 father speaks Afrikaans, a derivative of Dutch, from years of working in Africa. On the final day, he stood up to leave and said in Afrikaans, so nice to meet you too. It's been ever so interesting hearing what you thought about us and our fellow guests. By, he said that he's never seen anyone's face turn as red as those two. Our next reddit post is from Dangerous Web. Years ago, when I just moved in with my then boyfriend, Na'Fiance, he was terrible at picking up after himself. He was a self-admitted
Starting point is 00:07:12 mama's boy and went directly from his parents house to our shared home. Barely three weeks in, I was fed up, so when I told him that I was tired of picking up after him and acting like his maid he hit me with, that's not true, we both clean up equally. After a bit of back and forth he said, well, if you don't believe me, then let's split the house. You take care of your half, and I'll take care of mine. I took that literally. I got painters tape and I divided every single room in half, including the kitchen counter, the inside of the fridge, the bathroom counter, etc. Also he was cocky and suggested doing it for two months, but I shortened it to one month.
Starting point is 00:07:54 Not even one week in, his half looked like a pig's thigh and he had no more food because I stopped grocery shopping and cooking for him. The only exceptions I made was cleaning the toilet and shower because I was not about to use a filthy bathroom to make a point. He bought me flowers and chocolate, apologized for his behavior, and started learning how to be an adult. We're eight years into this relationship, and he's an amazing man, and we're about to get married. Beneath that, we have this comment from affectionate let. After three years of living with a very messy and dirty man, I stopped cleaning up after him.
Starting point is 00:08:31 A month later, he informed me that we should end things. I took pictures of our home to ensure that I'd never go back to him. Our next reddit post is from Kilted Turtle. I worked for a university that was trying to be progressive and upgrades to systems. They had recently replaced all but one key punch machine with a stack of new glass terminals. The idea was that the lone key punch would help transition the few faculty members to get rid of cards. The Computing Center reported to a finance person.
Starting point is 00:08:58 Initially, people complained to the finance department about the machines being missing. We were told in no uncertain terms that they did not want to hear anymore about the machines going away. About six months later, we announced that the key punch would be gone in two weeks. Chaos erupted with lots of people complaining to the finance department. Finance was angry and we agreed to hold a faculty meeting to discuss the issue. We met in the executive conference room which was conveniently next to the finance person's office. The meeting starts, and faculty members rail on about how they use that very important machine for their research, and we often use it five days a week. The rant goes on for like 20 minutes, with the finance department guy getting more and more upsets. The finance guy says, hey, so there's a small box labeled important computing center materials.
Starting point is 00:09:47 Can you send someone for it? The faculty says, I'll go get it myself and they stomp out. They come back with the box and the Finance person says, can you look at the box and tell us what you see? I see a box with dozens of stamps on it. What are the stamps? It looks like it's the official received stamp from my office with a date on it from about six months ago. Can you open it please? They open the package and dump out a circuit board onto the table. What is that? It's the control board for the key punch. It's been in that box in your vault for the last six months. The key punch hasn't worked one day since then. Silence. So, since nobody's been using the key punch for the last six months, are we okay to remove it? The key punch was removed the next day.
Starting point is 00:10:32 Our next read of Postage from Tubist. A few years back, I was on an interview panel recruiting for an IT specialist in our company. The interview process was pretty standard. A series of HR type questions, a technical test, and the presentation of a scenario. If you've worked in IT, you'll be familiar with this already. As we work through the list, we saw some good candidates, and some who are really out of their depth. Then in came that candidates.
Starting point is 00:10:58 You can usually tell by their overconfident attitude and their body language as they sit down. As you would expect, this was a dude. He looked each of us in the eye, sat down, leaned back in his chair, and what I can only describe as a power position, and the interview started. The HR questions went okay. We went through his resume and discussed his previous roles, and I started to probe a little bit deeper on some of his answers, because I noticed an odd hole. After that we moved on to the technical test. At that point he said, I can save you some time on that, here are all my certifications. I don't do contrived tests where I have better
Starting point is 00:11:35 skills than anyone here. Then he placed a stack of certificates on the desk. I've never seen such arrogance in an interview and I was taken aback for a moment. The HR person stepped up and said, Thanks for those details, we'll take note of that. But everyone who comes for a role here is treated equally. Part of our process is a technical test and this has been explained to you by the recruitment agency. He replied,
Starting point is 00:12:00 Yeah, but I explained to the agency, these tests are pointless and I will not be doing it. If you insist on doing the test, then you can terminate the interview. Fine, I was more than happy to comply with his request. I said, thank you very much for coming in. I'll get the security officer to escort you out. We stood up and left him waiting in the meeting room for security. His power pose had vanished and he looked totally shocked. The compliance with his request was probably not that malicious on our
Starting point is 00:12:30 part. I wish his following our company policy on equality and interviews. But still, I got a real sense of satisfaction seeing his bluster and arrogance evaporate. He was less than complimentary about us to the recruitment agency, but we were completely open and honest about the events with them. I gathered they chose to stop putting him forward for interviews very soon after that. Beneath that, we have this post from Don't Tell Him Pike. Many moons ago, I was on a panel for an entry level system administrator post that we had going. With these sorts of jobs, we used to get sent all sorts of drops by the local job center. Basically, if anyone had ever used a computer, they sent them our way.
Starting point is 00:13:11 Most of these people had no interest in the job, and they were only turning up so they could say they'd been looking for jobs the next time they went to sign up at the job center. Of course, we could always tell straight away who was actually interested in the job and who wasn't. One candidate in particular stands out though. He had a fairly relaxed stance during the whole interview. He did well in the technical test, and he was doing pretty well in the formal interview.
Starting point is 00:13:35 Just as the interview was drawing to a close, he started messing with his hair. He had dreadlocks. After what seemed like a few minutes of him fiddling with his head, he exclaimed, mid-answer, Ooh, a caterpillar, which he then placed on the desk in front of us. We then spent the remaining few minutes watching this caterpillar crawl from one end of the desk to the other. As you can imagine, the caterpillar was the only thing that we could talk about once he left.
Starting point is 00:14:03 Was this some kind of ploy to make sure that he didn't get the job? How did a caterpillar end up in his hair? What do we do with the caterpillar now? Where is the caterpillar now? Someone had better find that caterpillar before anyone else does, and so on. In the end, we did offer him a job, but he turned us down. So we figured that it was an attempt to sabotage his interview. We never did find that caterpillar. Beneath the thought that we had this comment from QX
Starting point is 00:14:28 Ray. Obviously, he was an expert at debugging. Our next Reddit post is from Visual Bimp. When girls started wearing slacks, my great-grandmother told her husband, my great-grandfather that she wanted to get some slacks. He blew up, insisting that no wife of his would ever wear pants. She could have argued, but she accepted his eat it quietly, until they went bowling. She found the shortest skirt that she could find. After all, he insisted she keep wearing
Starting point is 00:14:56 skirts and dresses. This was back in the 50s, and that night he agreed to let her get slacks. Beneath that, we have this post from FG Dawn. My grandmother had a friend of her husband decide that he could just drop off a stack of jeans to be mended. No asking, just plonking his clothes down on the table and saying, so up all the holes. So she did. She sewed all the pocket shut and all the leg hole shut.
Starting point is 00:15:23 Then she decided that the waist didn't count as a whole, so she sewed the zipper so that it was permanently down and open. And, of course, she also sewed or past all the damaged places as well. Reportedly, after he fell over trying to put a pair on, he ripped the stitches out of them and put them on, only to discover that he couldn't unzip them, and he couldn't get to the stitches on the zipper pull with a pants on because she had carefully tucked it inside of the fly. That was our Slash Malicious Compliance, and if you liked this content be sure to follow my podcast because I put out new Reddit podcast episodes every single day.

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