Welcome back to our slash Malicious Compliance.

Today's story is about a toxic boss who thought he could bully his entire tech team into working unpaid overtime during the holidays.

He literally put work for free in writing, revoked everyone's Christmas plans, and threatened their jobs.

Here is what happens to awful bosses, and the first one is titled work for free or You're fired.

So I am a lead on a small product implementation team at a mid sized software company.

We do the un sexy stuff internal tooling, integration's inventory zinc HR portals.

It's not flashy and nobody's putting it on a billboard.

But when it works, people get paid and stores stay open, and that's good enough for me.

Our team was steady and boring in the best way.

We had a director who cared about doing it right.

We had QA that actually blocked releases if something smelled off, and we had a known rhythm.

Then our director left for a better job.

We were leaderless for a minute, and then the company hired a new VP over our ORC who parachuted in like this season finale.

I will call him Kevin.

Kevin was the caricature of a startup bro who learned all the wrong lessons.

Basically, shiny suit, newer, shiny car, parking across two visitor spots because he was just running in and a way of talking like he invented oxygen and we should be grateful for the air.

If you've worked in tech, you've met this guy before or his cousin.

He loved saying window quarter and firmly in the same sentence, and he loved hating anything that took longer than a montage.

We were midway through a big implementation for a national client, big enough that the CEO had wandered up to our floor with doughnuts for once.

It was a serious project with a lot of integration points, security requirements, and compliance boxes to tick.

We had a timeline agreed with the client soft rollout after the holidays.

They even had a change freeze on their site.

Everyone was aligned for a minute.

Then Kevin called a floor white, all hands.

He stood in front of the TV, used the remote like a prop, and clicked to a slide that said window quarter in seventy two point font.

Kevin said, all right, Jim, I've been looking at opportunities.

The client wants to go live before Christmas.

I told them we can do it.

The room did that thing where everyone goes still, like if you don't move, maybe the t rex won't see you.

Me.

We told them we would do a soft rollout after the holidays.

Their I asked for a change freeze because they don't want to be swamped on their busiest days.

Kevin waved a hand like he was swatting a fly.

Kevin, they are thrilled.

This is huge.

We're going to wow them.

I told them we would do a full ship.

Hey, what do you guys call it?

A ga?

Yeah?

Ga?

By Christmas.

QA caved into her sleeve like she was choking on her soul.

Me.

We don't have security sign up on SSO yet.

Their SSO is sitting pending on our side.

Our info.

Sex still needs to review the IDP nons and replay protections, rate limiting and logging with PII masking.

Payroll integration isn't finished either.

The day time mapping still needs validation.

We don't have rollback scripts written for the current migration plan.

Kevin, details I need can do.

I've done this before.

We pull a few nights, bang it out, impress the client and get the renewal.

You guys can skip a holiday.

It is fine.

It's just Christmas.

It's just Christmas, did not Land.

People stared at their keyboards to avoid saying something that would get them fired, but he kept going, Kevin, So here's how this is gonna work from now until Christmas.

You're on no excuses, no PTO, no working from home.

We are going to be in the office, building, a war room, shipping.

If you want to be on this team and be a part of something big, you're here.

One of our deafs who had put in PTO months ago to take her kids to see grandparents, raised her head and said, dev I already booked out.

It's been on the calendar for months.

Kevin, All PTO is revoked.

That's not something he has the authority to just shout out.

But here we wear A couple people whispered.

Obbs looked at me and mouthed, can he do that?

Then he tagged on the part that really mattered.

Kevin said, and look, I don't want to get tangled up in time sheets on this.

This is all hands on deck.

We will keep youre hours on the download so our margin on the project does not get hit.

This is about loyalty.

We finished this for me.

I will remember it in your reviews.

If you're salaried, you know the drill.

If you're hourly, well we'll figure something out.

I stared at him because I wanted him to say it out loud, and he did.

Kevin, to be blunt, I need you to work for free on this push.

We cannot blow the margin with overtime.

That's what being a team player looks like.

And there it was.

People shifted in their chairs.

Mike qa leads, jaw clenched me.

Sorry, did you just say you need hourly folks to work for free?

Kevin, don't get legal on me.

Don't nickel and die me with paperwork.

Okay, be adults, get it done.

Def so if we don't.

Kevin looked right at me, and then it hurt.

And Kevin said, if you cannot commit to this, tell me now and we can talk about whether this team is the right fit for you.

That was the veiled you were fired, not subtle.

I didn't push right there.

I just said, can you put that in an email?

He rolled his eyes.

Kevin, I will send a summary.

We broke.

People went back to their desks like they had just watched the train almost hit a car slack lid up with DMS.

He cannot do that, right, he said, work for free.

I guess I'm eating my plane change fee.

Do I still go to my grandma's.

It was like being in a room with a fire alarm stuck on quiet and loud at the same time.

So I went straight to HR.

Our hr rap is nice, but she's the keep the peace type.

She has a stress charactus and a plaque that says be kind me.

He just told hourly employees to work for free, he said those words, HR.

I'm sure he didn't mean it that way.

There's sometimes that disconnect between expectations and communications.

We have a lot going on me, he revoked PTO.

He said, we cannot work from home.

He said, work for free.

And I'll remember who is a team player.

I need you to put in writing that hourly folks must be paid for all time worked and that previously approved PTO stands.

HR person said, let me talk to him.

Also looped in finance because nothing motivates a company like the words wage and our statutes and well, our finance guy is direct finance an email.

Do not tell hourly people to work off the clock, do not do not.

He doubled scent it like his keyboard got stuck.

He pinked me privately to say keep copies of everything, and then Kevin sent his summary email and it was worse than the meeting.

Kevin email effective immediately through Christmas, Product and implementation teams will be operating extended hours.

PTO approvals are suspended through the end of the month.

Exceptions by my approval only all hands are expected on site for salary.

Folks, you know the drill for hourly.

I need you to work for free where you can.

Don't log beyond your standard day so we protect the margin.

We are in this together.

Failure to support this initiative will be noted.

I forwarded it to HR and Finance and Edge are replied with nothing.

Finance replied to Kevin with this is not compliant.

Call me, and then HR pinked me and said, please don't escalate further.

We will handle it.

Spoiler.

They did not handle it quickly enough.

Kevin started walking around saying James like, I remember who's a team player, and you don't want to be on my bed side, and you really need to see your grandma.

He told QA that their quality obsession was a luxury, and he corned out one of our holy folks and said, you will get the credit in reviews right now, I need three hours.

Don't submit.

Oh tee.

That one got screenshotted so fast his laptop probably got a draft and his cooling fan.

He DMS me to pick it up.

I said, we will deliver what you approved.

He DM me, stop whining, very professional.

So I made a decision.

I booked a small conference room and called just my team.

We all walked in like we were headed to detention.

I put my phone on the table, hit record and told everyone I live in a one party consent state.

I was not planning to publish it.

I wanted a record of what I was about to tell them me.

I'm not gonna ask anyone to work unpaid hours.

If you are hourly, don't work a minute of the clock.

If he corners you, tell him to email it, screenshot it.

If you're salaried, I'm not asking you to kill yourselves for this nonsense either.

I called h I and Finance and they said they would talk to him.

In the meantime, we have two options, resist and risk getting people fired or complied.

To the letter def number one.

We could all call in sick me.

He's looking to make an example of someone.

He's itching for the fight.

If we push back outright, he will choose someone and swing.

I'm not giving him a target QA, so we let garbage ship me.

No, we should exactly what he asked for.

He wants an expedited plan with skipped steps.

We're going to write him a daily email listing the normal way and the expedited way, and we are going to ask him to confirm the expedited path and writing no code reviews.

Fine if he approves skipping them, no QA.

Fine, if he approves freezing coverage, no roll back, fine if he approves for WHATD only.

We are not sabotaging anything.

We're doing exactly what he orders, and we are going to save the receipts ops.

This is going to blow up me, yes, and when it does, we will show who lit the fuse.

Also, keep your own records of ours, not on the company system, paper, notebook, whatever.

Don't make up ours.

Be honest.

If you're hourly clock out on time.

If he tells you to keep working off the clock, ask him to put it in writing and then stop and send it to me QA.

This fields gross me.

It is gross.

He just told people to work for free.

I'm not letting anyone get fired for refusing to break the law.

We do what he orders exactly and only and when legal and finance look, it'll be clear.

We got to work with that plan.

Malicious compliance is not glamorous.

It's a lot of copy and paste and per you direction.

Every morning I sent Kevin a daily Status and Decisions required email did look like this me email item sso with client's IDP, standard security review, bane forsake, implement OIDC SAML flow with NUNS, replay protections, enable rate limiting logging, pim asking expedited bypass security review, implement bear OIDC handshake, skip nonsense replay tests, defer rate limiting logging tuning until after go live.

Please confirm expedited path is acceptable.

He always replied, fast, Kevin, do expedite it.

We need to move me item payroll integration, nightly badge, standard staging, data validation with clients real simple data DEDO pass check, some verification retries with exponential back off.

A learning of Badge exceeds expected duration dry runs in staging.

Expedite it validate on synthetic data only skip the DD you pass fixed retry count, check some's deferred alerting.

Later one smoke run confirm Kevin, do expedited chip it me ITEMPII storage.

And to be honest, I'm too lazy to read all of this damn technical stuff.

But basically Kevin once again said, do expedite it.

For the next thing, he said it once again, and well, you don't send a lot of emails with do expedite it and diver security review without those getting attention when the house is on fire.

At the same time, Kevin was still spraying gasoline everywhere.

He posted in the team channel all hands are expected on site, laid through Christmas.

We're a family, he DMed an hourly, deaf, you'll get credit in reviews right now.

I need three hours.

Don't submit, Oh tee.

I told the deaf to screenshot and forward to which our finance and me.

The screenshot lived in three separate personal backups.

By dinner, we kept writing code the way he told us to.

We wrote temporary scripts to massage data on the fly.

We left default passwords in a vendor tool because rotating later was on the list.

We turned off rate limiting because he wanted the login page to feel instant during his demo.

We wrote crons that assumed the badge would always finish in thirty minutes because that's what happened with five test records.

We wrote migrations with no rollback scripts.

We put two doos in the code where the tests should be, and a notated the coverage freeze per Kevin freeze you on a test coverage at eighteen percent.

I hate writing bad code.

It felt like sand in my teeth.

But each step had an email thread with his do expedite it on it.

Every time a dev said we shouldn't do it this way the next slannin', the email said please confirm you want us to do it this way, and his reply said do it.

The hours started piling up.

Saleried folks did long days, hourly folks clocked out, and some were pressured to stay by Kevin's team player routine.

They wrote their hours in cheap composition notebooks.

I put out with a post it that said write your hours if you want.

Some people didn't expect a time later.

They stayed anyway because they were scared that path sucked.

One night I found our intern asleep on a beanbag at like eleven thirty pm.

He's not even out of high school.

He looked like he'd been run over.

I woke him up, told him to pack up, and walked him to the bus stop.

Kevin pink me, where is she?

I replied, copying HR effective immediately per state labor laws regarding MINUS.

The intern will not be here past seven pm.

I sent him home.

HR did reply.

Kevin did not either.

I saved it.

Though Christmas plans were wrecked, people cancel flights and eight change fees.

A few of us stayed in town instead of going home because we were told we had to be on site.

He scheduled a celebration push for the day before Christmas and told us to be there.

A bunch of us showed up because we didn't want to get fired for not being team players.

Someone brought sugar cookies.

They tasted like dry wall.

We followed his process.

QA wrote a note and said, per Kevin's direction, standard regression testing is skipped coverage frozen at eighteen percent.

We pasted it into the release.

Dock ops wrote, per expedited plan, no rollback script exists.

Do not attempt to roll back.

We pasted that too.

We pushed the release.

It worked for the happy path.

Kevin liked to demo.

He recorded himself clicking around the dashboard and send it to the client and our executives with the subject line we did it.

He popped sparkling water and tried to give a speech about family that did not land.

The next day was Christmas.

We were not in the office.

We didn't work, but we weren't at home either.

Most of us who had planned to travel had already canceled.

We were in town with our phones on the table, waiting for the boom.

And the boom came.

First, it was password, Rey said failures.

Then log in page slowdowns.

Then some stores couldn't load inventory tables, support tickets popped like popcorn.

The two of us who had agreed to monitor light forward it alerts to Kevin.

He replied, pick it up, hustle.

I replied, we did not book an on called schedule per your direction.

He then stopped dming me and started damming random deaths, including hourly folks who had clogged out already with need you know, don't look time be a team player.

Around midday, the client PM called my personal phone he got it from someone who remembered that I actually fixed things.

The client PM said, I'm getting hammered.

What's going on me?

We shipped an expedited built per your VP's approval.

Many standard safeguards were deferred.

Client PM, who approved that me, your counterpart and our VP.

In writing, Client PM, I need a rollback and change controls back on me.

There is no rollback script.

We can hot fix forward.

He exhaled, all the way people do when they're trying her to scream.

Client PM said, loop in your executives.

By the next day, the client CTO was on a call with us.

He was come calm as bad Client CTO.

It seems like corners were cut, Kevin.

We shipped the MVP.

It's normal to iterate, Client CTO.

We don't iterate on production, payroll or PII.

He said, like he was ordering a sandwich.

Client CTO.

Did someone overwrite your stand up processes?

Me?

Yes, Kevin, we collectively decided to me he approved each expedited step at writing.

I got the emails.

Kevin.

We are family families.

Don't point fingers.

Client CTO, I'm not interested in metaphors.

Revert to last stable built and enable change controls.

If you cannot by the end of the day, legal will be in touch.

Revert was not an option because, as documented, there was a whole rollback script.

Kevin said, we could do it.

We ended the call.

He'd dragged me into a glassroom and tried to make me the villain.

Kevin said, you don't undercut me in front of a client me.

I told him the truth.

You approved the cuts, Kevin, I approved an MVP.

You guys shipped garbage.

You said work for free and skip QA and no rollback.

We did exactly what you told us to do.

We complied exactly.

He slapped out.

People pretended not to look.

And that afternoon we got a meeting invite.

I'd been waiting for crisis Remediation Update client release.

It had the COEO, cfo HR legal, Head of sales, declined PM and Kevin.

This was gonna be a ride.

So the court started with the CEO asking three questions like a prosecutor.

CEO said, did you require hourly employees to work off the clock?

Kevin, We asked for a team effort.

COO, yes or no, Kevin, We encourage flexibility.

Finance turned his camera on.

Finan said he sent an email for Hourly.

I need you to work for free where you don't or cannot lock beyond your standard day, so we protect the margin.

I told him to call me, but he didn't.

Multiple Hourly employees have screenshots of him dming them right now, I need three hours stone submit O T so yes, Kevin.

People are misinterpreting this, CEO.

Second, did you skipsey security review me?

Yes, per is written approval.

I could daily emails outlining standard versus expedited with his do expedited replies, CEO, send those now ice creenshirt I scrolled, I highlighted line after line, do expedite it rate limiting the FOD do expedite it.

Application level came as field encryption deferred, do expedite it, logging reduced, do expedite it rollback scripts deferred.

Do expedite it wording that might as well have had his signature engraved.

CEO.

Third, do we have a rollback plan?

Ops?

No, per expedited plan, Kevin.

I explicitly told them to prioritize, not to cut essential me.

You exact reply was do expedite it and ship it silence legal unmuted legal O P please forward all emails and any recordings to me and HR.

Then Kevin tried to turn it on us.

He said we sabotaged him.

He said we acted with malice.

He said we were not team players, and he said we tanked it on purpose.

He said we were not hungry.

He said work for free or you're fired.

In a private zoom he called with just me and the QA lead earlier that morning.

He literally said those words and then smirked.

I'd recorded that zoom and at the end of the call when he said work for free or you're fired, I said, okay, boss, buy and I clicked leaf meeting.

Then I emailed Legal and Finance with the subject wage and hour on the exact call.

Legal asked do you have a recording of him saying that?

And I said yes.

They said send it.

I did the CEO's jaw the clencher again.

He looked tired, co Op, thank you effective immediately, your team is not to do any more work on the client system without security and legal sign offs.

HR take Kevin off this project.

Finance, calculate back pay and penalties.

Legal contact the client with a remediation plan.

Kevin, you cannot sideline me.

This is my COO, we will talk.

The call ended for most of us HR Legal, Finance and Kevin State.

I went for a walk because my hands were shaking.

The fallout and fast.

We spun up a real war room with info sec obstaff, QA and a program manager who doesn't talk like a ted talk.

We put change controls back on.

We wrote paper migrations and scripts.

We added rate limiting.

We turned on structured async logging with Saint sampling.

We implemented application level field encryption with KMS and rotated secrets properly.

We also finished the IDP security review and tested replay protection.

We validated payroll badge with real sample data in staging, ran d doop and check some and set exponential back offs with alerts.

We tested and staging like adults.

In a week.

We did what should have been spread across six It was brutal, but it was the right brutal.

We shipped the proper build now.

The client was still annoyed, but Comma and sales aid Crow Legal sent a letter that was basically a bouquet with the check stable to it.

The client accepted our remediation plan and they didn't bail.

HR sent out a remediation note to hourly employees asking for any unlocked hours.

It used softwarees like miss alignment instead of wage theft, but finance did the real math.

People submitted their notebooks, and some folks had assumed they would never see a dime for those hours.

The back pay and penalties only came later after finance and legal stepped in.

The company.

Cut tacks for back pay with time and a half were required, plus some penalties.

Because you don't get to forget to pay people.

HR asked us to sign acknowledgments that we had been paid correctly.

I asked Legal if signing meant I couldn't go to the labor board, and Legal said, you can always go to the labor board.

HR shot legal a look.

I kept that email anyway, and then HR did a walk with security to Kevin's glass office.

They went in, it was quiet, and they walked out with him.

No box.

He didn't get the luxury.

He didn't look at anyone.

He stared straight ahead, face red.

He got in his shiny car.

He had to back up because someone had parked close to his bumper.

He looked very small driving away.

After he was gone, the CEO called in all hands.

He apologized for the pressure and said it was not aligned with our values.

He said the word wage and our out loud and said we will make this right.

He looked at me and said, thank you for documenting when you were asked to do something unsafe.

That's the closest the SEO gets to you.

Saved us from a lawsuit.

He announced that we were instituting a real holiday deployment policy.

No Christmas pushes unless there's a signed executive waiver in clients sign off with a planned on court schedule and compensation.

PTO revocation now requires executive approval in writing and cannot apply to previously approve PTO unless there's a declared emergency.

Also, hourly overtime must be approved and paid always, no exceptions.

And security got a seat im planning instead of learning about releases from slack.

Finance, got explicit authority to block directives that violate wage loss.

QA got their veto back, and we got comm time for the holiday we lost.

It was not the same as being with family, but I took a proper long weekend later and didn't open my laptop once.

A week after the dust settled, the client PM sent me a card.

He wrote, next time, we will ignore the vps and listen to the people who build things.

There was a gift cut in there.

They probably violated our no gifts policy.

I took it to legal, and legal said we didn't see that.

I bought the team pizza from the air.

As for Kevin, he put a LinkedIn post up about mutual parting and taking time to reflect, and then tried to start a consulting company.

He published a piece about inspiring teams that made me choke.

Somebody send it to me, but I didn't reply.

I was busy not working for a clown.

After all that, HR asked me to help with the training about healthy deadlines.

I said yes, because apparently I'm that guy.

Now.

I told a room of manager something simple.

Every shortcut you forced someone to take will come due at the worst possible time, and the people you forced to take it will be blamed unless they have receipts.

Don't make them need receipts, or they will keep them.

Some nodded, and one day one of them will probably try to be another Kevin.

At least now there's a policy and a paper trail added on the work for free.

He literally said those words, and he wrote them in a summary email, and he DMed several hourly folks telling them not to submit ot we screenshoted everything and at the time people thought they were working for free.

The backpay only shut up because Financed Legal forced it when they realized the exposure.

And yeah, guys, if you enjoy the malicious compliance stories, please don't forget to like the video and leave me some sty emojis in the comments to show your support.

The next one is another amazing malicious compliance story.

It is titled be available during lunch sure thing?

So my manager sent a passive aggressive message to the whole team, clearly aimed at me.

Lunch brakes are unpaid, but everyone is expected to be available during four hours, including lunch.

I used to take a quick walk or step out to grab coffee, never missed meetings, never late.

But fine, if she wants me available, I will just play along.

I started eating lunch at my desk every day, no headphones, not working, just sitting.

I ignored emails and messages, and when people came over, I would smile and say I'm on my unpaid break, but I would jump on it.

At one one day, she sent a messenger at twelve ten asking for a report asap.

I didn't reply until one o'clock someone else had scrambled to do it by then.

She later asked why I didn't respond, and I just said I was available, just not working as instructed.

And let me tell you, she never brought up lunch breaks again.

And the next one is another beautiful, malicious compliance story that you don't want to miss.

It is titled get rid of Those Damn dand Alliance.

So I'm twenty four, living in my first place on my own.

I had rented a townhouse.

This was back in the late eighties, even when poor people could rent the entire houses, and was putting myself through college, not a lot of money to spare, but I was cutting by.

The townhouse was not detached, and I had two neighbors whose homes were directly attached to my own.

I got along fine with my southernmost neighbor AKA.

We said hi when we saw each other and that was about it.

But the other neighbor, he had a chip on his shoulder so generally rude.

If we bumped into each other, I would say hi or good morning, he would ignore me, scowl, turn away, etc.

Whatever, no big deal.

I just took it in strided.

Being a struggling college student, I did not have a lot of money for none essentials.

Most of the people in the neighborhood poured wheat killers on their lawns every spring.

I didn't do this for several reasons.

Most important, I think it's a shame to poison the local water table.

And while I love a nice lawn, I don't think you have to cater to grass.

I prefer a more natural look.

Back then, though, that meant regular grass, but with some crab grass and dand allions.

One day, Bob starts beurrading me over my dent alliance.

He said, it doesn't fit the neighborhood.

Don't you have any self respect?

You bring down the tone of the neighborhood.

Every time he would see me, he would tell me that I need to pour poison on my lawn, which I explained I couldn't and didn't want to do.

At first, there was polite, as I wanted to be on good terms with my neighbors.

But Bob started getting angry and angrier and more and more unreasonable, started calling me poor white trash.

One day, I'm coming home parking my driveway with some friends from school in my car.

As we are getting out, Bob comes outside and shouts at the top of his lungs, get rid of those damned and allons.

He looks over and knows what's my friends getting out of the car, and he is clearly embarrassed, but he doubled down and started talking directly to my friends.

Did you know your friend is an embarrassment to the neighborhood.

How does it feel to be friends with white trash?

I had just about had enough of his anger, but then and I snapped back, told him to f off and mind his own business.

Several days later, I get a knock on my front door.

Open up the door and it's a by law enforcement officer.

Says he's responding to complaints of noxious weeds in my backyard and asks to come take a look for himself.

Being a middle unit, the only access to my backyard was through the house.

I invite him in, offer him a drink, of which he gratefully accepts hot day, and take him through the backyard.

Lots of lovely white and yellow dandellions peppered over the yard.

He takes one look and gives a deep sigh.

There were no noxious wheats, which I knew full well, as I had long ago taken the precaution of checking with the city to see what was and what wasn't acceptable in the wheat department, and I knew I was well, very comfortably within compliance.

The bylaw cop apologized for wasting my time and said my yard was nowhere near problem.

He left and went next door to chastisize my neighbor for wasting his time.

I started at my front door and listened, and it was glorious listening to Bob's sputtering and being angry, trying to defend himself and vilify me, all to no avail my wife and I.

I cannot even sit out and enjoy our backyard because of all those stupid Dan alliance.

The Bilog cop told him to stop arresting his neighbors and then left, But listening in gave me an idea.

I knew Bob liked to sit out on his back deck in the afternoon, so I waited.

As soon as I spotted him out there, I walked into my backyard, ignoring Bob as I gathered up a nice bouquet of white topped dan allion seats ready to disperse to the wind.

We had a four foot high chain link fence between our properties, so the view between yards was pretty much unobstructed.

I stood at the fence, locked eyes with Bob, and started blowing thousands of dandelion seats into his yard.

The wind was at my back, so the weeds were traveling quite fine to his yard.

He grew red faced and started yelling at me, what's the matter, Bob.

I'm just doing what you asked and getting rid of my dandellions.

He yelled some more, and I just ignored him.

After depositing several dandelions worth of seats, he went back insides.

From that day forward, for the next several weeks, every single time I saw him out on his deck, I would go out and send more dandelion seats into his yard.

Eventually, dandelion flowering season ended, and I wanted to think that Bob learned a lesson about bullying, but he didn't.

I would post some of his other bullying attempts at some other time.

And before we enter the video, let's read another funny story from our slash Malicious Compliance.

It is titled auto repair Shop Exceeded My maximum price quote.

So many years ago, I had a nineteen eighty one Ford career pickup that needed some engine work.

After meeting with a local auto repair shop that specialized in rebuilding engines, I asked if they could take a look at the engine and get the truck operational again.

After examining the engine, he said it needed rings, valve work, plucks, plug wires, and a list of other things.

I asked if he could do what he suggested for one thousand dollars or less.

The shop owners said he could do that, and we agreed on the one thousand dollars maximum price and I dropped off the truck.

A couple of weeks later, he called to tell me that the truck was ready to pick up and the bill was a little over one thousand, three hundred dollars.

I asked what happened to my maximum limit of one thousand dollars.

He said that once they got in, they repaired a few extra things while the engine was open, upgraded some components beyond what was necessary, and believed it was worth the new price.

But I mean, at least they are honest about doing things that are not necessary.

I told him that I was only willing slash able to spend one thousand dollars, and that is why I gave him the maximum.

He said that if I did not pay, they would just keep the truck.

And by the way, guys, just to quickly interject here, have you ever been scammed by any mechanics?

Let me know about your stories in the comments.

I would love to hear them.

Anyway, The reason that I had a maximum of one thousand dollars was if repairs were over, that I was gonna take the money and just buy a newer used vehicle.

Well, let me tell you.

After a long pause on the phone while I did some fast mental health, I told him just keep the truck and then I hung up.

He called back in about three minutes and told me to come and get the truck for one thousand dollars.

And yeah, guess I gotta say.

It is always just a few bad apples that ruin it for everybody else.

Not every mechanic is a terrible person or a scammer.

But if you get scammed one time, then I have the feeling that you will always be a little bit more cautious and always expect to maybe get scammed or something.

Either way, I hope you enjoyed today's video.

I will see you again tomorrow, and please don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already