Welcome back to our Slash Malicious Compliance.

Imagine being the backbone of your company for decades, only to have a new boss force you out because you are using a wheelchair.

This Karen boss thought she was getting rid of dead weight, but what happened next cost them everything.

Let's dive right into the video, and the title story is called our slash Malicious Compliance.

New Karen boss tried to fire old man in wheelchair before retirement.

Big mistake.

So I've worked in corporate long enough to know that the people who look their weakest on paper are often the ones holding everything together.

In my case, that person was the old guy in the wheelchair.

I will call him the old guy, but to his face we all just called him sir, or by his first name shortened.

I don't want to use any names here, so I'll just say old guy and boss and seeoh for context.

I work in operations for a manufacturing company.

We make custom components for bigger companies.

Our stuff has tied specs and long contracts, and a lot of our systems are older than me.

Our ERP is some Frankenstein's system with custom modules duct taped together by people who retired years ago.

Except one.

The old guy in the wheelchair was the last one left to actually understood how everything fit together.

He had essentially been there forever.

He knew where every weird setting was buried, which screens light, which reports you could trust, and which ones were trash.

He handled everything, production planning, we had order exceptions, manual overrides, rushing, job changes, cost roll ups, all of it.

He also happened to be in a wheelchair after some kind of accident long before I joined.

He never made it a big deal, so none of us did either.

The building was modified before my time, ramp at the site, white office store, adjustable desk, that kind of thing.

When I first started, my training was basically shadow him and do what he does.

That is how everyone learned.

There was no formal manual.

There was a folder on a shared drive called Dogs, but he with mostly outdated pfs and spreadsheets with vague names like new Costing, Final real one x LSx and by the way, guys, that's exactly how I named my documents as well.

I already liked this old guy.

The old guy had his own system.

He had printed diagrams pinned up a notebook full of shorthand that made no sense to anyone else, and a memory that was scary.

You could ask things like, hey, that aerospace client from two years ago, the one with the weird tolerance on the bracket, do you remember what we did?

And he would rattle off the workaround and even the PO number, So yeah, he was important.

And then we got a new operations manager.

The old one retired and the company decided to modernize the department.

And to the new boss, I would just call her boss or Karen boss.

She came from a big retail chain, had a shiny resume full of buzz words, and walked in with that attitude where she clearly thought all of us were lazy and stuck in the past.

You know the type.

Big speeches about disruption and fresh eyes and doing more with less.

The first week she held a team meeting, she stood at the front of the conference room with a slide deck talking about how we needed to stayandadized processes and reduce key person dependencies.

The funny thing is here.

If she had respected the old guy and worked with him, she probably could have done some good.

But she did not see him as the backbone of the place.

She saw an old man in a wheelchair, high salary nearing retirement, who apparently refused to document her words not mine.

She did not hide it either.

Once early on, she walked past his desk while I was sitting there, asking him a question and said, jokingly but not really, Oh Pete, don't let him keep everything in his head.

What if he doesn't show up one day?

The old guy just gave her this look and said, I've been telling Mentionment that for years, but she wasn't listening.

She already decided that he was the problem.

The tension really started when she pushed this new ticket system for internal requests.

Before, if planning or sales needed something special done, they would come to us or just email.

It was not perfect, but it worked because the old guy knew who was serious and who was just panicking.

Bos was insisted everything go through a formal ticket.

On paper, it was not the worst idea, but in reality, the system she bought was some cheap, generic workflow app that didn't fit our mess of a system.

We told her, and she rolled her eyes and said stuff like you are just resistant to change.

This is standard in modern companies.

But meanwhile, the old guy was quietly doing his job keeping the chaos from reaching the surface.

But he was never disrespectful to her.

By the way.

He was actually annoyingly professional.

He would say things like yes, boss, and then go back to fixing the things that would have blown up the company if he didn't.

But he also did not sugarcoat reality.

When she would say, we need to switch over to the ticket system completely by next quarter, he would say, we cannot do that until someone translates how these special cases work.

The new system doesn't handle half of what we do.

She heard, I don't want to change, But what he was actually saying was your shiny new tool doesn't do what you think it does, and if you force it, something is gonna break.

She started getting more and more annoyed at him and escalated slowly.

She would see him on snippy emails like as we discussed, please ensure you're following documented process going forward, when there wasn't any documented process in reality.

She would cut him off in meetings too.

She started talking over him when he tried to explain why some shortcut she wanted was not possible.

The ableism started creeping in two Once he was in the break room and I overheard her talking to it are low voice, but not that low, saying something about accommodation costs and attendance concerns, never mind that he had better attendance than have their able bodied staff.

One afternoon, she called me into her office.

She had this thing where she would ask you to close the door and then do the fake friendly tone.

I sat down, so OPI you're pretty good with the system, right, decent?

I said, he's still the one with all the answers, though she smiled in that way that doesn't reach the eyes.

Right.

But you're young, you are hungry.

You understand why we are trying to go.

We need people like you if we're going to modernize.

I just kept listening because I knew something was coming here.

I'm going to be making some changes, She said.

I need people who are on board with me, not stuck in the old way.

You get what I'm saying.

Not really, I said, because I was not going to give her anything to twist.

Later, she said, I am trying to help you.

There are people here who don't have a long term future with this company.

They are blocking progress.

Meanwhile, people like you are held back because they insist everything go through them.

That's not fair, is it?

I shrugged.

I don't feel help back.

If anything, I'm still learning from him.

Her expression tightened.

Well, you might want to think ahead.

If things shift, I will need senior folks I can rely on.

People are not afraid to step up and take ownership.

That was the end of that talk.

I went back to my desk and told the old guy about it later, leaving out some details.

He listened, nodded slowly, and said she's gonna try to get rid of me.

I asked, you really think so?

He left, But there wasn't any humor in it.

I've seen this movie before.

New manager big Ego thinks experience as a cost center.

I'm expensive on paper and I don't play politics bad combo.

Can she even do that?

Though?

I asked, you, like critical infrastructure here, anyone can be fired.

He said, the question is how bad it hurts when they actually do it.

At the time, I thought he was being dramatic, but I was wrong.

Over the next month, she started building a case against him.

You could see it if you knew what to look out for.

Suddenly there were performance improvement plans with vague goals like increased documentation output, without any realistic support.

She would toss him random adment tasks that had nothing to do with his job, and then ding him when he didn't prioritize them.

Over urgent production issues.

She would schedule check ins that overlapped with the times he usually helped shipping figs, last minute order changes, and then she would lock that he was late to check ins because he was literally solving the problems that kept the company running.

On top of that, she did Patty's stuff that made his life harder.

She reorganized seating and tried to move him to a corner away from the accessible bathroom.

HR actually pushed back on that one, which is one of the only times I saw them stand up to her.

The whole vibe in the office shifted.

People were walking on eggshells.

The old guy just kept doing his job, but he started documenting everything, not in the way she wanted, but in the way a person does when they know a fight is coming.

He kept a lock of comments, emails, last minute scheduled changes, and so on, that kind of thing.

But then came the meeting.

It was a random midweek morning.

She sent an invite to him with HR on it half our block subject line discussion.

He rode over to my desk, parked beside me and quietly said, so, today's the day.

I looked at the calendar and saw it two nights to night.

I asked if he wanted anyone with him.

He said no.

He was calme, almost too calm.

He went into her office right on time.

I was not in there, obviously, but I heard enough from him afterwards and from HR to note the general flow.

She opened a pholdo with that practiced serious look and started listing of concerns about his performance, stuff that either was not real or was her twisting reality, things like you haven't adopted the new ticket system, but he had.

It just didn't work for half the things she handled, you continue to rely on undocumented tribal knowledge.

There wasn't any time to document because she kept cutting anyone who could help you resist change.

He resisted breaking things that were working, and then she dropped the line that she had clearly rehearsed.

Given all of this, we see two pass forward.

One is a formal termination for performance, which would be documented in your file.

The other option is that you voluntarily resign.

That way, there's no drama known as your record, and you can move on gracefully.

He told me that h R just sat there staring at the table.

You could tell they hated it there, but they were not going to step in.

He asked, is it an ultimatum?

She said, it's your chance, but yeah, I need an answer by the end of this meeting.

Either way, you won't be staying in your current role.

I need to build a team that supports my vision, he said later that.

There was a long pause, but then he asked if I resigned, do you expect a notice period?

She said, stand up notice per your contract, But I expect you to keep things professional and not drag this out.

No drama.

You've been here for a long time.

I'm sure you don't want to burn bridges.

He looked at HR.

They still said nothing, so he nod at once and said, okay, I will comply.

She leaned back like she had just want something.

So you're choosing to resign, he said, yeah, I was submitted in writing voluntary resignation as requested.

I'll comply with your demands, and that was it.

He rolled out.

Afterwards, came to my desk and shrugged.

She got what she wanted, he said, Now we will see what happens.

I was stunned.

I asked him, if you wanted to fight it, go to see oh, bring in a lawyer something.

But he said, you hurt her.

She wants a quiet, drama free voluntary resignation, no escalation, no messy process, no fast That's exactly what she'll get.

And that's when I realized this was not just him giving up.

This was him deciding to comply so literally with her demand that it would bite her later.

He typed up a short resignation letter, no emotion, just I hereby voluntarily resigned from my position, effective at the end of my contractual notice period per hour conversation.

He printed it, signed it, and handed it to HR boss.

Acted all sweet in front of everyone, fake smile, fake said voice like, we are going to really miss you.

It is time for new directions.

That kind of garbage.

The malicious compliance part of the story didn't really kick in until the next day.

First, he pulled up his contract and company policy.

He had a lot of unused vacation, like really a lot years of refusing to take more than a week at a time so he could cover year end craziness quarter and all that policy said he could either be paid out or use it as part of his notice period subject to manager approval.

Notice period was a decent length because of his tenure.

He emailed the boss and HR copying me and a couple others because he wanted to be transparent, and the email basically said, as discussed, I have X days of a crude vacation.

I would like to use all of this as part of my notice period, starting immediately and have my last working day b x y Z date.

I understand from company policy that this is allowed with manager approval, so please confirm.

Boss had just told him that she expected him not to drag things out.

If she refused, she would drag it out herself.

If she accepted, he would be gone immediately.

She replied approved, thank you for keeping this professional.

Please ensure a basic handover of your responsibilities before the end of the day.

That last sentence is where she basically gave him the perfect malicious compliance hook.

Basic hand over, not complete documentation or anything not comprehensive training plan.

She wanted it all quick, low drama basic, so that's what she got.

He spent that day writing a handover document and I saw it.

It was about two pages long and looked like something aboard in turn wrote as a placeholder.

It had section headings like production planning tips, with lines under them that said stuff like refer to existing EERP screens and follow standard work instructions for exceptions, see historical emails for examples.

For the critical legacy stuff, it literally just said complex cases handled historically using judgment based on experience.

Refer to archive pos.

He sent it to Boss and HR by the afternoon.

Then he locked out of everything, cleared his desk, took down his pin diagrams, packed his notebook, and left.

That was his last day.

Boss almost had a panic attack when she realized he was actually not coming back to the name.

Next morning, she came over to my desk, Where is he on vacation, I said, She frowned.

He's supposed to be working out his notice.

I pointed at her own email.

You approved his request to use his vacation for his notice.

It's right there, She stared that the screen re read it and you could see the realization hit.

She had been so focused on getting him out without a scene that she signed away her own buffer zone.

Well, she said, stiffly.

You shout out him, you will have to pick up whatever he left and this is where my part of the malicious compliance came in, not as dramatic as his, but still important, because she had already told me in writing in one of those coaching emails that I was not to bypass formal processes and that all requests had to go through the new ticket system.

She had also told me in person that I needed to stay in my lane and let senior staff handle critical exceptions until I was ready.

She removed the only senior staff who actually knew how to handle critical exceptions, and I was not going to break policy to clean up her mass.

So when sales started sending me panic chats like hey, can you do that manual overwrite thing Hened does for client X?

They need to change the run sequence so the line will be idle, I said, submit a ticket per boss's new process.

I'm not authorized to do that manually.

They would crumble submit the ticket and it would land in a queue.

I would open it sea it required some obscure process only the old guy knew.

Forwarded to Boss with a note like need guidance, no documented procedure for this, please advise.

She would reply with stuff like this should be straightforward, follow the standard work flow, but there was no standard workflow anymore.

For half of it, the old guy was the workflow.

First couple of days, it was just frustrating or US slowed down.

Some reports didn't get generated, and people assumed it was just a temporary blip.

The real chaos hit at the worst possible moment.

The quarter end our quat in process was an insane dance of reconciliations, cut off and adjustments.

The old guy did most of it.

Usually he would sit there with spreadsheets, EERP screens, a calculator double checking everything.

Finance relied on his numbers more than their own system.

Boss, of course, hadn't planned for any of this.

She just assumed this system would do it all.

Once the bottleneck was gone, quarter and weak tickets started piling up like crazy, stuff like why is line three showing no work orders for next week?

Client wire is saying their blanket order is not appearing.

Material variants report as blank back order report is missing half the items.

I forwarded everything to her.

Every time she asked why I couldn't just fix it, I replied with some version of I don't know how.

There's no documentation and I'm not authorized to improvise.

She snapped at me in one meeting, saying, this is ridiculous.

You've been here long enough.

You watched him just do what he did.

I kept my voice, calm, with respect.

That would be bypassing the formal processes you put in place.

You told me not to hack the system like he did.

Remember half the room went quiet because they remembered she had lectured me in front of them once about cowboy solutions.

She tried to back pedal.

I met at the time.

This is different.

I said, then, I need written approval that you take responsibility for any changes I make outside documented process.

She opened her mouth, closed it and said we are cerca back.

She never gave the written approval, so I complied, I stay in my lane.

I did only what I was trained and authorized to do.

I followed the procedures exactly as written, with no tribal knowledge shortcuts, and within a week.

Production scheduling was a mess.

Some lines had no work because the orders were not released properly.

Other lines had three overlapping jobs because no one adjusted them the way the old guy used to shipping was sending stuff without proper cost allocations.

Finance was screaming because inventory numbers made no sense.

A major client called furious because their parts didn't show as shipped in the portal even though they physically left.

It turned out some integration script the old guy baby said, had failed, and no one knew how to restarted without messing up transaction ideas.

The CEO started getting dragged into daily crisis calls.

At first, boss blamed legacy systems, but then she tried to blame staff resistance, and then she started throwing me and others under the bus.

He was supposed to train his replacement, she said.

In one call, point at me through the screen.

He stout him he's just not stepping up.

I unmuted it with all due respect.

That's not accurate.

I was never formally designated as his replacement.

I was not given time or resources to document what he knew.

In fact, I was told to stop asking him questions and used the ticket system instead.

So yeah, also, you insisted he leave quietly and quickly, without escalation, which meant there was no structured handover.

You could see the CEO processing.

That is that true, CEO asked her.

She fumbled something about different perspectives and change management.

The CEO asked why did he leave exactly?

I thought he was retiring next year.

Boss said he decided to resign.

It was his choice.

He was not aligned with the new direction and wanted to move on.

She left out the part where she gave him the fire or quit ultimatum.

Obviously the basic handover emails she sent approving his vacation as notice, though that was still sitting in her scent folder, timestamped with hr ME and other c seed.

As things got worse, other cracks popped up too.

A long term client reached out to CEO directly with a strongly worded email about declining service and loss of our key contact.

They mentioned they always trusted the old guy because he understood there we had requirements, and now no one seemed to know what was going on.

Another client paused the next order until we could prove we still had control over our processes.

Finance was laid, closing the books for the first time anyone could remember.

That triggered questions from the board.

Basically, all the invisible value the old guy had built over the years suddenly became very visible by its absence, and because Boss had pushed so hard to get him out quietly, there was a paper trail showing that it was her call.

At some point, CEO stopped having these calls were just operations.

He pulled an HR finance and even it, and on one particular arly call, he asks straight out, how did we let ourselves become so dependent on one person without a succession plan?

HR to their credit spoke up.

We actually raised a concern when Operations moved to terminate his role.

There was an attempt to offer retirement planning and transition, but the decision was to proceed with voluntary rescuers and minimal disruption.

We were told escalation was not desired.

Boss jumped in, that's not how it happened.

He refused to cooperate.

He was always blocking change.

HR dead pant said we have the notes, emails and his signed resignation referencing that meeting.

We can provide them.

You could almost hear the CEO connecting the dots.

He didn't yell on the call, he just got very quiet and said send me everything.

After that, things moved fast.

Two days later he flew in.

You know, you can tell when someone important is in the building just by the way people suddenly walk faster instead of straighter.

It was exactly that.

He sat in a glass conference room with Boss and HR.

Most of the day.

The blinds were closed.

People kept walking by, pretending that they had somewhere to be, just to see.

Late afternoon, the door opened.

Boss came out, eyes red, holding a folder, and she went straight to her office.

Ten minutes later, she left the building with her coat and back, didn't say a word to anyone, and didn't come back.

Our official line later was pursuing other opportunities, but un off officially, everyone knew she had been fired.

However, they still had a huge problem.

So basically they had no one who could untangle the mess sheet created by pushing out the one person who knew how everything worked.

So CEO did the only thing that made sense.

He called the old guy.

I only know the details because the old guy told me later over lunch, but I'll relay it the way he said it.

He was at home enjoying what he called forced early retirement.

He'd been spending more time with his grandkids, doing hobbies, actually sleeping in.

His health had improved just from not dealing with stress every day.

His phone rang unknown number but local.

He answered, and it was the CEO.

See O basically opened with we need your help.

Apparently his tone was a lot more humble than I'd ever heard him at work.

They talked for a while.

CEO apologized not just for what happened with Boss, but for letting the culture get to a point where someone like that could push out someone like him without anyone stopping it.

Then CEO asked if he would consider coming back, and the old guy said in what capacity?

CEO said something vaga about advisory and transition support.

Old guy said he would think about it and wanted it in writing c O to his credits and over a draft the next day.

The offer was decent, higher salary than before, some sort of senior advisor title, were remote work flexibility.

They wanted him back full time for at least a year to fix things and documents.

He read it, made a few notes, and then called a lawyer friend.

They went through everything.

The lawyer pointed out all the leverage he had.

He had been pushed into a voluntary resignation that looked a lot like a force termination, which he hadn't challenged.

They were now desperate enough to ask him back, and the chaos since he left gave him proof of how much value he had actually added.

He could have sued, but he chose not to.

He chose to comply with there we need your help request, but on his own terms.

He sent back a counter offer the highlights, as he paraphrased to me, he would come back as an external consultant, not an employee.

He would work as set number of hours per week, mostly remote, with the right to refuse last minute demands.

His hourly rate would reflect what had actually caused to replace him, not just his old salary bumped up a bit, but a serious consulting fee.

He would get a big signing bonus framed as a completion bonus for documenting the systems he had built and training his successors.

He'd require that any performance evaluations future or pass related to boss's performance concerns be wiped from his file or clearly marked as invalid.

He wanted Autonomy to choose and train at least two people as his successors, properly, with dedicated time blocked off and protected.

He sent it.

CEO called him half an hour later.

Can we meet in person to talk numbers?

The CEO asked, and the old guy said, I'm not haggling.

That's my rate If it's too much.

You're free to find someone else who can fix this, but you already tried that, right.

CEO was quite for a second and said, I'll get this approved, and he did.

A week later, the old guy rolled back into the office.

It was honestly one of the most satisfying moments I've had at work.

He came over to my desk and parked in his old spot.

Miss me, he asked, I said, production schedules, certainly did?

He left.

We had a new interim operations head by then, not perfect, but at least not hostile.

They'd been told to stay out of his way while he did his thing, and for the first month didn't touch anything directly.

His contract was clear.

He wasn't there to be a crutch.

He was there to build a bridge.

He spent hours with me and a couple others walking through how everything really worked.

But this time we actually had dedicated time blocked on the calendar for knowledge transfer.

No one was allowed to pull us into the meetings during those blocks.

CEO himself sent an email back in that we built real documentation, not eighty page word dogs with bus words, but actually step by step procedures, float charts, and diagrams.

He explained not just what buttons to click, but why each workaround existed.

We flecked whether the system was broken beyond quick fixes and needed a tea involvement.

He sat down with at and we mapped out an actual plan instead of just yelling this system sucks.

Whenever someone tried to dump random tasks on him, because you know how to do it faster, he would point to his contract hours.

If they insisted, he would say, okay, what do you want me not to do that?

Shut them up?

Quick finance come down because quarter and when smoother production stopped freaking out as much, sales started trusting planning again.

And as for me, I got bumped up.

Not over night, but gradually my title changed, my pay went up, and I became the go to person for a lot of what the old guy used to do.

He made sure I was confident before he let me own anything.

He would watch me run a process and then say, good, next time, you don't need me for that.

The unspoken message was always, you're not staying in my shadow forever.

I'm not building another single point of failure.

On his last official day of the consulting contract, the company threw him a real redirementcent of not some cake in the break room thing.

See oh showed up with a speech.

There was a proper bonus check, and people actually said things like we would not be here without you.

He downplayed it, of course, said he just kept the wheels from falling off.

But we all knew.

After his little farewell, he wrote over to me one last time.

Remember when I said there's always a price when you fire someone, He asked, I nodded.

He paid it, he said, in the most literal way possible.

And yeah, guys, if you enjoy these malicious compliance stories, please don't forget to like the video and tell me in the comments where you are watching from today.

The next one is titled if You're going to watch TV, you have to include your little sister posted on our slash malicious compliance as well.

When I was around ten, my parents had a rule, if the TV's on, your little sister has to be allowed to watch too, if she wants.

I usually wanted to watch cartoons, and she always wanted to watch those annoying single long shows arguments every day.

One Saturday morning, I turned on the TV, plopped her down in front of it, and immediately put on a wildlife documentary about ants.

I sat there with the remote and hand, patiently explaining every single scene to her like it was the most exciting thing in the world.

She lasted about six minutes before running off.

My dad poked his head and saw her already running off to play and asked where the TV was still on.

I told him she didn't want to stay.

I don't know if my parents knew what happened, but for some reasons, my parents quietly dropped the you must include her a rule.

For the rest of that summer, cartoons were her mine again.

And the next one is another funny story titled Scheduled breaks must be taken on schedule.

My work has very little interaction with others for the most part.

Basically, you come in, do your work, go home, except for a meaning or two during the day.

Pretty straightforward.

New manager comes in wants everyone's schedule so he can keep track of the comings and goings.

Your breaks at lunch need to be scheduled the same every single day and taken on time.

According to a memo, my morning break is at the end of the team's fifteen minute huddle.

Well, a few days later, the huddle is running along, so I got up and left the room after fifteen minutes.

She must have thought I was using the restroom, but I was actually sitting in the breakroom, which she noticed when she walked through at the end of the huddle.

Every single time the huddle ran long, I would leave after fifteen minutes.

She finally asked about it, and I replied that my break was scheduled and needed to be taken on time.

She said that means within reason and not to walk out on meetings.

I then asked if she was going to amend her memo.

She didn't amend her memo.

I didn't change my routine.

Discontinued like a pissing contest for the six months she ran the department until she transferred.

Next manager turned huddles into team meeting bullet points for the day, and we all went back to normal.

And the next roun is a malicious compliant story that is titled Cargo Gets Priority.

You got it?

Boss?

Hey, I'm writing as this is happening right now.

I work as a ramp agent in a regional app pot in Europe.

We've been suffering a workers' shortage for years now, but it has finally become critical.

We don't have the personnel anymore to operate all the flights, not enough people.

Our most paining customer is the famous cargo company who's really picky about rules and search.

Plus they want a really specific amount of workers under the flight.

In order to cover for that, our boss told us, if you are called for the cargo, just drop what you are doing and run to the cargo.

They are our top customers.

We have to give them priority.

Okay, you got it, boss.

So today we got some sickness and we had to pull everybody from all the other flights.

The flight I'm currently under could have been finished in three minutes, but now it will be delayed.

But I don't know by how long.

Have fun with all the complaints from the other companies added, it is a malicious compliance story because what we used to do was leave a guy behind with the ramp agent akame to finish the loading.

But we are not doing that anymore because management said just drop what you're doing, And honestly, both the guys and me are pissed to always run and make an effort for garbage pay and to see more and more seasonal colleagues left at home because there isn't enough work so that we have to always run and work unsafely?

And here, guys, thank you for watching.

I will see you again tomorrow