rSlash - r/Maliciouscompliance I Tricked My Stupid Boss Into Paying Me Extra 💰💰💰
Episode Date: June 1, 2021r/Maliciouscompliance In today's episode, OP starts working at a company where his friend is also an employee. When OP's friend realizes that OP is making more than her, she starts to jealously harass... OP, forcing him to take on extra projects and work on weekends. OP is more than happy to comply because he's racking up overtime! OP's friend thought that she was making OP's life miserable, when in reality she was just helping him make fat stacks 💰 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Welcome to R-slash, a podcast where I read the best post from across Reddit.
Today's subreddit is R-slash malicious compliance where OP embarrasses a stupid lawyer in court.
Our next Reddit post is from Yahweh's in there. So disclaimer, I'm a lawyer but I'm not your lawyer and none of this is legal advice.
A client comes in with a seemingly simple auto collision.
My client got hit and the other driver got out and said something like, oh my god are
you okay?
I'm so sorry.
I dropped my phone and I reached down to get it.
My client had a dash cam that recorded the whole thing, including the admission of guilt.
Easy client, right?
It turns out that the admission of guilt was really important, because this type of accident
didn't make it easy to determine fault.
Imagine a rear end collision at a red light as an easy determination, but a collision at
a four-way stop sign is a hard determination.
When the cops showed up, the police reports said
that both drivers were at fault, and they didn't mention any statements about the other driver.
But we had an admission of guilt, and my client's damages were above the other guy's policy limit.
So I sent a demand to their insurance company for policy limits. It's important to note that
the insurance company has an obligation to negotiate in good faith, which becomes important later.
The lawyer from the insurance company reaches out and says,
Look, my client says they were driving safely and the police report indicates shared fault.
Their initial offer was for about $10,000.
I said, yeah, but my client had a dash cam and it recorded your client admitting fault.
It's important to understand that this was before dash cams were common.
It wasn't my first case with the dash cam.
It might have been my third or fourth.
No mention of the dash cam was made on the police reports.
The insurance attorney says, while I imagine twirling a dumb mustache.
Interesting.
Can you send me a copy of this video?
I say sure and send it over.
He replies, I can't open this. So I send
him a link to the VLC media player. I say the video has a weird extension and Windows
media player won't play it, but VLC will. Just follow the installation instructions and
it should play no problem. I'm not installing something to watch your alleged dashcam video.
Send me a file I can play if you want me to consider it. This makes me unhappy,
but I try it again. I said, this will take less than a few minutes to install, and you can watch
the video and listen to your client admit fault. We're done here, until you can send something
that I can play. Cue malicious compliance. Imagine a super cool montage of me going through
other client files.
Stop the montage as I open a file and my face is bathed in a golden light radiating from
an old memory LCD.
So I found a different dashcam video which didn't contain any sound.
But it could be played through Windows Media Player.
And it was close enough to my current client's case that if you weren't paying attention,
it could pass.
The other attorney just asked for any file that he could play, right?
I sent it over and he said, wow, no sound. Guess you're done, buddy.
So, I sued.
During discovery, I sent a CD over which included the original video and a copy of VLC.
He must have ignored it because he didn't say anything about it.
During a pre-trial motion hearing, I played the video for the judge. The judge might have heard
the other lawyer's jaw hit his desk. The insurance attorney says,
"'Your Honor, that is not the video that he sent me. In my mind's eye, I see the malicious
compliance death star preparing to fire.' I said, Judge, I thought that he might say that.
Here's a copy of our emails where I described the video, provided the video, and send instructions
on how to play it.
Here's a copy of the CD that I sent with Discovery, which also has the video and a copy of
BLC.
Finally, here's a copy of the unrelated video that I sent to fulfill his request of something
he could play.
The other attorney asked for a recess.
Because he refused the initial demand of policy limits, I told him that I would argue that he
didn't negotiate in good faith. We settled for well above policy limits, and my client was very happy.
PS don't go to law school, hashtag not worth it.
I love these types of stories, because no one can be more maliciously compliant than a lawyer.
And down in the comments, we have this story from Jack's Magic Man.
My divorce lawyer was like that.
He was maliciously compliant, and he found ways to piss off the other attorney.
He knew my ex-wife's lawyer, and he knew that he had a hot head.
My lawyer said that my ex-wife's lawyer likes to get under people's skin, and the first
time you answer more than the question he asked you, he's going to ask you in front of
the judge to only answer the question that he actually asks.
I think the lawyer used it as a tactic or something.
The judge probably grew tired of it, but this was his lawyer's way of showing that he was
in charge.
My lawyer also knew a second thing about my ex-wife's lawyer, that he had a habit of
asking a question in a way that wasn't asking a question.
Something like, you agreed to this contract, and leave it at that.
That wasn't technically a question, but it was said in a way that it was meant to be
a question.
My lawyer told me that if he tried the only answer questions that I asked BS, then to
go ahead and not answer anything where he doesn't use an actual question.
So the questioning went like this.
You had an inspection done at your house to make sure that it's suitable for children.
I did, and she told me my house was well suited.
I didn't ask you what she said.
I asked if you had an inspection.
Please try to answer only the questions I ask.
Yes, sir, and my attorney gave me a head nod.
The inspection revealed that your son's room
didn't have a baby monitor in it.
Silence.
We must have sat there for a minute before he said,
will you answer the question?
You didn't ask a question.
I could see my lawyer smile and the judge
shake his head. He made sure to actually ask questions for the rest of the time.
Our next credit post is from Isadork. I've been working a technician job for this small
company doing normal stuff. During the course of this job, my boss asked me to send a picture
of my work. Our relationship was already very strained by this point. I took a picture of my work
and in the picture I included the latter that I was working on because I wasn't going
to move it just for a picture to my boss. When I arrived back at the office, my boss
calls me to his desk. He wants me to sign a paper saying that I performed an unsafe
work act. The act in question was that I had used a customer's ladder. To be clear,
this company had been using that customer's ladder for the four years that I had been
working there, including this very same boss. He talked to me about ladder grades, how
I shouldn't have used the ladder since I didn't know its grade and how much weight it
can support. He then sent me home early and told me not to come in the next day because
I had been suspended. I was pissed,
but luckily I know Union reps from other companies that handle safety regulations. So I get
a hold of the official government booklet and spend my day off studying. My very first
day back, my boss asked me to take a company ladder to go to a job. I look at every company
ladder and I identify their all classified as grade three household
ladders. None of these are within grade to support my weight of 250 pounds, let alone my
tools. I break the news to my boss, turns out that none of the jobs he wanted me to do today
could be done, because he had to instead provide ladder training which he failed to provide
when I joined the company, and he also had to find new, very expensive A1 grade
ladders.
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Our next breaded post is from YTA I Get Suspined.
As part of the plan to return to the office post COVID,
my company has done a lot of reorganization
of who can permanently work from home,
who can hybrid, et cetera.
I really wanted to work from home full-time.
I hate our office with a burning passion.
It's distracting, it's a long commute, there's no benefit to being there, so on and so forth.
I would just rather be at home.
Well, they started giving out new designations in May, and I got designated as in-office full- time. It made no sense to me. I work on a team
of eight people and each of us is in a different office somewhere in the country. I've literally
never been to an in-person meeting or needed to do in-person work in the three years of
this company. Every single other person on my team got designated to work from home.
So I brought it up with my boss and asked to work from home. So I brought it up with my boss and asked
to work from home. When I started at this company and lived elsewhere, I got to work from home for
four months before I moved. And during the past 14 months during COVID, I've also been at home.
So for 18 of the 36 months that I worked at this company, I've been working from home.
What I was told is that I go idle too often in chat for them to trust me to work from home.
Basically, we have a company wide and some message system that shows us is either available,
idle or in a meeting.
If you don't touch your keyboard for 5 minutes, you show up as idle.
So they've decided to use that as a measurement for who is and who isn't working.
The thing is, like many people in many jobs, I don't have a full eight hours of work every
single day.
The amount of work I have to do on a typical day takes three to five hours of actual attention.
There simply isn't something to do all the time.
My performance numbers actually went up while working from home.
In fact, in all key performance indicators, I'm either in first or second place.
There isn't work to do that I'm neglecting
or procrastinating.
When something comes up, I simply do it until it's done
or until I can't do any more
due to waiting on someone else than I stop.
Also, I've done that method long enough
that my work queue stays empty
because I work to get my queue down to the point
where when something comes up,
I immediately address it and be done with it.
But because I have other ways to spend my downtime,
instead of just messing around online
and my cubicle pretending to be working,
meaning I show idle more often.
That means that apparently I'm a worse worker.
I was told that if it weren't for that,
they would let me work at home.
So I wrote a six line power shell script
that virtually inputs the
period key every 4 minutes. It starts running every day at 8 a.m. and stops at 5 p.m. So now, I literally
never go idle. I do the same amount of work and still read books, watch TV and play video games on
the side. But, I now have a shiny green check next to my name all day. Because of COVID complications, they eventually said no going back into the office until Labor
Day.
I just had a meeting with my boss, and he said that over this time they noticed that I
go idle a lot less than I used to.
So they're changing my designation to work from home.
All because of a little green check mark and some software.
This concludes my TED Talk on why loads
and middle-level managers are the dumbest, most useless, do-nothing positions in all of
corporate America. Alright, OP. So basically, the faster and more efficient you were as a
worker, the more that they punished you. Right? You're doing your job amazingly, you responded
immediately, you didn't make any mistakes because if you made mistakes, you'd be constantly working
on things.
But no, for your efficiency and accuracy, they respond by punishing you?
What?
Our next Reddit post is from Profile Electronic.
This happened a couple of years ago.
I was working on a part-time basis in a small firm owned by friends.
The pay wasn't very good, but the atmosphere was, and I was
allowed to set my own time. So overall life was good. Then a friend who my only new-thru
social media approached me for a job in her company. Even though they were offering good
money, I turned down the offer because I knew that I couldn't get the benefits that I was
getting in my current job. Plus, the commute to the new office was very long.
I would have to travel two hours one way and take three trains just to reach the office.
A month later, the HR of the new firm approached me again.
They offered me almost four times the money that I was making, and they said that I could
work my own hours.
They also offered extra pay for overtime and weekends.
This was important.
So I joined the new company. My friend didn't
know the terms of the agreement that I had with HR. She acted like I owed her big time
for getting this job. So one day I corrected her. I told her that I turned down the offer
that she made me, and then one month later I got a completely separate offer with more
favorable terms. So I was here because her company really needed me and not because of her.
I didn't share the details of my agreement with her, but we both realized that she was making
significantly less money than me. This completely changed her attitude towards me.
Now she wanted me out, but I was determined to stick with this job for at least a year.
So she decided that she would make it very difficult for me to work so that I would want
to quit on my own.
I have a bunch of stories about how she tried every trick in the book to make me quit.
I'll share some of them here.
She was my manager, so she was in charge of allocating work.
Malicious compliance number one.
She started piling more work on me than on any other member of the team.
I was happy to comply.
What she didn't know was that as part of my contract, I would be paid 1.5 times the
hourly rate for every hour that I worked overtime.
And two times the hourly rate if any work was allocated to me over weekends or holidays.
Every time she tried to ruin my weekend by calling me into the office unnecessarily,
I happily complied.
This continued until I left the organization, when I told her how much extra money she
helped me make.
Militious compliance number 2.
After that long commute to work, I used to get hungry, so I developed the habit of stopping
at the food court to pick up a glass of fresh fruit juice and carry it with me to work.
My manager saw this as a way to harass me without actually seeming to do so. So she sent out a notice saying that bringing liquids
to the office was a hazard. Ironically, she used to have coffee delivered to her desk three
times a day. Well, I pointed out the rule applied to her as well, and if I couldn't have my juice,
she couldn't have her coffee. She had to literally spend an extra unpaid hour at work every time she wanted her special
coffee.
Meanwhile, I was happy to legally sit in the food court, have my glass of fresh fruit juice
with some snacks, and then make in my work day half an hour later than usual.
Man, people are so weird.
If I found out that one of my friends was making more money than me, I'd be thrilled I'd
be so happy for them. But why do some people out there need other people to suffer so they can be happy?
I just don't get it.
That was our slash malicious compliance, and if you like this content, be sure to follow
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