Having an aggressively abusive boss will make your working life intolerable, and this negativity will likely bleed into your personal life and make that worse as well. Unfortunately, especially in some industries, bad behavior from the bosses is almost an expectation, with egotistical CEOs and owners unleashing wrathful attitudes on workers lest they forget who is in charge. This user, Redditor u/EAwithOddTasks, shared their story to Reddit's r/MaliciousCompliance subreddit. While the post didn…

There's a prevalent school of thought that prevails when it comes to client servicing: Do anything (and everything) possible to keep them happy and contracted; having worked in these sectors in the past, upper management never likes seeing a contract cancellation notice pass across their desk, even if that contract was costing the business money. I've seen sales departments signing clients at unserviceable rates—with wildly unfulfillable resource estimates. Why? Because the sales team got a com…

Talk about a toxic work environment!

Chasing a singular metric with reckless abandon will never be good for your business and, depending on which singular metric you choose to chase, can have a range of disastrous results. Let's go with an example: Imagine you work for a company that services multiple clients on an ongoing contract basis. The price of each contract is determined based on the time it will take a technician to attend the site and carry out routine checks on scheduled maintenance—with this being estimated based on th…

Often when we see stories online about customer service people, it's regarding the abuse they receive from customers. But, since service industry workers are people too, it should be expected that there are plenty of examples of the worker themselves being unreasonable or entitled. These stories don't fit the popular narrative, so they often don't get upvoted as frequently, getting shared less overall as a result. It's no surprise to anyone that ‘upscale’ trendy establishments can have a bit of…

Managerial roles are not meant for everyone, yet somehow the most unfit people seem to land them anyway. It quickly becomes apparent when somebody is not a good fit to manage people, and in this case, it was more than apparent. In this instance, u/According-Air5665 explained there was a woman at her previous job that became a total Karen after she got promoted. Prior to her promotion, she'd gotten along with the team. But afterward, it was a whole different story. She made it her mission to cut…

Many business owners underestimate their worker's contribution to the company's success, instead thinking of themselves as deserving all the credit. After all, it's their company, so they clearly have all the answers—right?.. Wrong. You're not always going to be able to come up with all the right answers yourself, even if it's your business. A leader's strength may simply be that they're skilled at building a strong team and recognizing when an individual has a particular strength or skill that…

This is what you get for being nosy!

Driving when you're tired is pretty much as dangerous as driving under the influence. If you topple anxiety, stress, and a work burnout on top of your sleepy drive, you might be in for a sketchy journey. One exhausted employee found out the hard way just how dangerous it is to drive when you're not in the best mental state. After dealing with a serious mental health crisis and weeks of prolonged sleep deprivation, u/pinkfairykm an Australian native

A hasty and rude retail worker quickly corrected this woman when she pointed out a pricing error on a chef's knife she was interested in. She relented in revealing the mistake to the worker and ended up with a deal on a great knife. This story was shared to the r/MaliciousCompliance subreddit by u/TIL_eulenspiegel , the woman in the story, where it earned 19k upvotes as of the writing of this post. When she went to the department store, she was greeted by an "older man" who was extremely helpfu…

Flight attendants see the good, the bad, and the ugly. To be fair, anyone working in the service industry gets access to the entitled side of the world. This employee was working as a flight attendant at a regional airline and had enough of her usual, disgruntling encounters with a rude, entitled traveler who happened to have ties to her boss, VP Karen. One day he arrived, pompous as ever, demanding to be upgraded to business class. He didn't have a coupon, which was necessary in order to recei…

Whoever came up with the saying "the customer is always right" should be seriously questioned. In this instance, we have an intense conflict between a technician and a so-called “engineer” customer. This guy went against the technician's advice several times and insisted that the technician perform what he knew would be a destructive test. The technician shared his story via this thread on Reddit's r/MaliciousCompliance subreddit. He tried to explain to the customer that this was a mistake, eve…

Managers often have the tendency of getting employees to jump through hoops in hopes of getting promoted, then don't end up delivering. This employee did so much extra work that she actually saved the company $45,000, but alas, she was told she was still not ‘deserving’ of a promotion. In other words, even if you do a good job, it's not good enough. Fed up, OP decided enough was enough, because if the company was saving $45,000 but still couldn't ‘afford to give OP a raise’, then why bother put…

We've said it once, and we'll say it a thousand times: When making a demand from an underpaid retail worker who would probably rather be somewhere—no, anywhere else than standing here listening to you, you'd better choose your words wisely. You might end up with exactly what you wished for—just… not quite how you pictured it. (The monkey's paw curls .) That's what happened in this classic case of malicious compliance, which was shared to the popular Reddit sub of the same name by Redditor u/Lai…

Karens enjoy being given attention (albeit negative), and unfortunately, it tends to come at other people's expense. Especially those who work in customer service, AKA baristas, servers, retail workers, etc. This Karen picked the wrong day to mess with this barista, as it was the employee's last day. Karen had a constant rude, demeaning attitude, making employees and customers hate her alike. So it couldn't have been that much of a surprise that this employee snapped. But of course, we're talki…

Some people's pursuit of unchecked control and profit causes them to make shortsighted blunders. At least their own greed and stupidity are holding them back because these people's constant manipulation of legal loopholes and leeching off societal virtue means that they otherwise are getting a leg up on the rest of us. Enter stage right: Landlords—a group infamous for their corner-cutting, profit-seeking, and below-the-belt tactics. It should be no surprise that a landlord made such a decidedly…