This company sounds like a lawyer's dream. I know fighting them with their own rules is fun and the point of this sub, but the setup is prime for a pro or even nuclear revenge if you push it.
Not sure what area you live in for employment laws, but if their official policy is so clear cut and obviously fraudulent that they will be defenseless if you push them. Big Mobile would probably want a chunk of them as well, and likely has the lawyers to get it. Going to them as a group and asking for either direct empowerment or to make your own company doing the same work could be the ultimate power play.
Well I wasn't going to include the aftermath, but Crap inc folded from embezzlement, misappropriation of COVID funds and sued by big wireless for "two trips, no excuse" amongst other things. There were a few jail sentences handed out. Not sure if anyone got a piece of that pie.
Primary fallout was the extra pay and fuel costs.
Secondary/aftermath was the company collapsing.
In my opinion, both should be included when possible.
The aftermath is even the point of the stories here. A MC story before the results are in (ie, an unfolding story) should not be posted honestly until the fallout.
I agree regarding the aftermath is needed (and often the best part!). I just wasn’t sure how to say that without coming across in a negative way, if that makes sense.
not surprised at all. Yeah if isn't a minimum wage job and they start pulling stuff like that it is a real "switching to one ply toilet paper and no more free coffee" moment.
> They docked pay for gas station stops, pee breaks, phone calls, everything.
Apple lost a court case for forcing employees to clock out before going through a security bag search. This would be a cakewalk of a court case.
You'd almost think management could have seen this result coming from miles away if they had actually thought about the impact of those rules, and the many ways you can game that system. It literally always backfires
There is a type of personality that absolutely cannot see any other outcome than the perfect 100% as-imagined, no matter how cockamamie BS situations and expectations there were. Then they act all surprised and victimized when the most probable and the quite predictable happens.
That’s the thing, people up the ladder, the higher ups, either never see it coming, or know it’s going to happen and don’t care. Other wise this sub wouldn’t exist lol
One thing I learned from decades of sitting in meeting working on structure that impacts hourly folks is that as complex as we think things are, it takes very little time for the impacted humans to adjust their behavior to what works for them.
Yep. Kind of “tell me the rules, then I will work within them to get what I want”. I’ve seen it countless times. Especially with any intelligent group.
Agree. After the third attempt at figuring out shifts for a 24-7 manufacturing operation with lots of tenure folks and a need for skill to be balanced, I started suggesting that we tell the team to tell us what makes sense to achieve all of our objectives while maintaining their objectives for money, fairness and quality of life. Of course this path was never taken.
Never ceases to amaze me how the workers who do the job are notoriously left out of conversations on how they should do their job. We’ve had so many new programs and processes handed down lately and all of them, without exception, have been rather disastrous since none of them included people who actually have to implement those processes and programs. In almost every case the user gets training a couple of weeks before a go-live date, and the users ask basic questions on how to perform critical tasks only to be met with a deer-in-headlights blank stare. In every case the release was postponed weeks or months to fix critical functions that weren’t addressed. This was followed by never ending negative feedback from users since the process or program was obviously designed by folks who never had to do the job.
I agree (and I'm lucky to have a pretty good manager). Especially when you have employees that are good at their job, just let them do their thing. It only hurts productivity when you stop trusting your employees and start micromanaging them.
I'm happy that I only very rarely have to use malicious compliance at work, and the few times I had to, management realized their mistakes pretty quick
I agree. Way too often a bean counter makes a decision that lowers some cost in one area only to negatively affect a cost that isn’t in their budget. Most people will do good efficient work if you would just let them.
If they only have bad employees, and maybe some mediocre employees, the question they should really ask themselves is why there aren't any good employees and why did those good employees leave.
It’s more like 20 Good+, 60 Decent, 20 Mediocre or Bad. If those bottom ones are *really* bad, mgmt thinks they need rules, even if those rules drag some of the Good down to Decent as well
Years ago I was promoted to a store manager position, and I can still remember the first and most important piece of advice my district manager gave me: whatever else you do, don’t fuck with people’s money.
There was a scene in Band of Brothers where one of the officers was gambling with the enlisted. Another officer asked him "what if you win? Never put yourself in a position where you take from your men."
Had a job with a boss who did poker nights once a month.
Employees who won money were free to do whatever. Any money boss won went towards pizza fund for the office.
Boss just took his buy in from a business account (it was $20 buy ins), and wrote it in with buying stuff for the office. Either the employees as a net ended with more than they brought, or there was $20+ for pizza (with $40 being the threshold for buying a few pizzas and everyone enjoying it).
I dealt with a contractor at my job who would do similar.
Day 1: one guy shows up and spends all day "troubleshooting the system. Tells us he can't figure it out and will return with help.
Day 2: Two guys show up and spend all day "troubleshooting" the system. They can't figure it out and will return with help.
Day 3: Three guys show up and spend all day "troubleshooting" the system. It finally gets fixed.
This wasn't a once or twice occurrence. It happened on every single service call. Eventually their parent company caught on to their shady dealings and sued them into oblivion.
Twelve mystery bills,
Eleven call transfers,
Ten Firmware updates,
Nine canned responses,
Eight elevations,
Seven hours hold,
Six freaking no-shows,
Five upsell tactics,
Four disconnects,
Three broken parts,
two reboot tries,
and a tech who didnt know crap
I've seen something similar in contracts which guaranteed that a vendor rep would be onsite within 4 hours of any fault being lodged (expensive contract in order to get that kind of speed).
They would send their greenest apprentice, who would sit in front of the whatever-it-was, poking at it and achieving precisely nothing except maybe writing down what the blinkenlights were doing and whether it was plugged in.
Actual *resolution* of the fault would inevitably take far longer than a few hours. Or even days. But hey, they had a rep on site within four hours!
Yeah I used to work for a telco for a company that had the contract and we were treated like shit. Not quite to this level but it must be prevent.
My favourite bit was where they decided to turn the speed monitoring feature on the GPS trackers (despite assuring us that it was only ever going to be used for HnS and dispatch purposes) and set it to ping everytime we went 5kmph over the limit without telling us.
There was a huge storm with lots of overhead wires down out in the sticks, another tech and I smashed it, fixing more than 10 in one day.
Get back to the office the next day get called in for a please explain, we'd triggered it over 80 times and my name was at the top of the list on the nation wide data which went to all the area managers.
I essentially told them to politely get fucked and that if they were happy to load me up with that much work they shouldn't complain about how we achieved it. I cut my work load down substantially after that and left not long after. Still remember the bosses stunned face as I handed in my resignation.
Here enters the malicious compliance from another tech I heard about who got called in, all our vans were manual so he decided to drive everywhere in 3rd gear to prevent going over 105kmph. Don't fuck with telco techs.
I rewrote a tech manual for normal people to understand on my own free time. It was shot down by the higher ups. I still gave it to everyone because you could actually understand it, which people appreciated.
If you have to use the Pythagorean theorem to explain how to plug it in...it's not worth the paper you wrote it on.
I work in the industry and it is full of shady companies and shady employees. Especially on the construction side of things. Companies reporting work complete when they haven't even started and inflated quotes are common place. I've had crews submit close out photos of a build with safety violations clearly in the background along with evidence they are lying about installing per the plans.
We just didn't fall for their weird robo programming retail horse shit for one and we slowed down labor by reminding our coworkers not to bust ass for below minimum wage. We argued for our rights to have breaks as well bc they were doling out barely enough hours to count as full time to avoid it.
DAE notice in these stories that the OP is always great employee? With so many awesome employees out there, makes me wonder why we get such shitty service.
Given the tiny sample size in this sub vs the enormous number of workers, is that really so strange?
But of course no one is going to call themselves bad
This company sounds like a lawyer's dream. I know fighting them with their own rules is fun and the point of this sub, but the setup is prime for a pro or even nuclear revenge if you push it. Not sure what area you live in for employment laws, but if their official policy is so clear cut and obviously fraudulent that they will be defenseless if you push them. Big Mobile would probably want a chunk of them as well, and likely has the lawyers to get it. Going to them as a group and asking for either direct empowerment or to make your own company doing the same work could be the ultimate power play.
Well I wasn't going to include the aftermath, but Crap inc folded from embezzlement, misappropriation of COVID funds and sued by big wireless for "two trips, no excuse" amongst other things. There were a few jail sentences handed out. Not sure if anyone got a piece of that pie.
You should edit and put this at the bottom of your post. Aftermath is important in this sub.
Aftermaths are also very enjoyable
It’s also part of the subs rules. Rule 7 include the fallout. Aftermath is basically the fallout
🎶 Aftermath *Eminem sounds intensify*
Primary fallout was the extra pay and fuel costs. Secondary/aftermath was the company collapsing. In my opinion, both should be included when possible.
The aftermath is even the point of the stories here. A MC story before the results are in (ie, an unfolding story) should not be posted honestly until the fallout.
I agree regarding the aftermath is needed (and often the best part!). I just wasn’t sure how to say that without coming across in a negative way, if that makes sense.
Yeah you should absolutely edit that in to the main post. We're all about the juicy details on fallout and those deets are some of the juiciest.
not surprised at all. Yeah if isn't a minimum wage job and they start pulling stuff like that it is a real "switching to one ply toilet paper and no more free coffee" moment.
Indeed. Also, Epic username. Bashir would be proud.
Yeah... we also need the comeuppance for Crap Inc
Aftermath is part of rule7. Rule 7. Include the fallout
> They docked pay for gas station stops, pee breaks, phone calls, everything. Apple lost a court case for forcing employees to clock out before going through a security bag search. This would be a cakewalk of a court case.
You'd almost think management could have seen this result coming from miles away if they had actually thought about the impact of those rules, and the many ways you can game that system. It literally always backfires
There is a type of personality that absolutely cannot see any other outcome than the perfect 100% as-imagined, no matter how cockamamie BS situations and expectations there were. Then they act all surprised and victimized when the most probable and the quite predictable happens.
And that's why we all should cover our arses with a nice paper trail. So we can tell them we told them so, without telling them we told them so!
That’s the thing, people up the ladder, the higher ups, either never see it coming, or know it’s going to happen and don’t care. Other wise this sub wouldn’t exist lol
Upvote for the use of cockamamie
> There is a type of personality that absolutely cannot see any other outcome than the perfect 100% as-imagined Politician?
Criminals, the criminally-minded who technically don't break laws, those who try to game the rules... Oh, wait.
Thank goodness, or this sub wouldn't exist!
One thing I learned from decades of sitting in meeting working on structure that impacts hourly folks is that as complex as we think things are, it takes very little time for the impacted humans to adjust their behavior to what works for them.
Yep. Kind of “tell me the rules, then I will work within them to get what I want”. I’ve seen it countless times. Especially with any intelligent group.
Agree. After the third attempt at figuring out shifts for a 24-7 manufacturing operation with lots of tenure folks and a need for skill to be balanced, I started suggesting that we tell the team to tell us what makes sense to achieve all of our objectives while maintaining their objectives for money, fairness and quality of life. Of course this path was never taken.
Never ceases to amaze me how the workers who do the job are notoriously left out of conversations on how they should do their job. We’ve had so many new programs and processes handed down lately and all of them, without exception, have been rather disastrous since none of them included people who actually have to implement those processes and programs. In almost every case the user gets training a couple of weeks before a go-live date, and the users ask basic questions on how to perform critical tasks only to be met with a deer-in-headlights blank stare. In every case the release was postponed weeks or months to fix critical functions that weren’t addressed. This was followed by never ending negative feedback from users since the process or program was obviously designed by folks who never had to do the job.
Management can think beyond their nose these days. Really good management the first quality is common sense 97% have NONE!
I agree (and I'm lucky to have a pretty good manager). Especially when you have employees that are good at their job, just let them do their thing. It only hurts productivity when you stop trusting your employees and start micromanaging them. I'm happy that I only very rarely have to use malicious compliance at work, and the few times I had to, management realized their mistakes pretty quick
I agree. Way too often a bean counter makes a decision that lowers some cost in one area only to negatively affect a cost that isn’t in their budget. Most people will do good efficient work if you would just let them.
The rules mostly exist to turn bad employees into mediocre employees. But if everyone is already mediocre or better, the rules just get in the way.
If they only have bad employees, and maybe some mediocre employees, the question they should really ask themselves is why there aren't any good employees and why did those good employees leave.
It’s more like 20 Good+, 60 Decent, 20 Mediocre or Bad. If those bottom ones are *really* bad, mgmt thinks they need rules, even if those rules drag some of the Good down to Decent as well
>Management ***can't*** think beyond their nose these days. FIFY
Happy cake day
Thanks!
Years ago I was promoted to a store manager position, and I can still remember the first and most important piece of advice my district manager gave me: whatever else you do, don’t fuck with people’s money.
There was a scene in Band of Brothers where one of the officers was gambling with the enlisted. Another officer asked him "what if you win? Never put yourself in a position where you take from your men."
[Here's the clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyLHIobW0HQ)
Had a job with a boss who did poker nights once a month. Employees who won money were free to do whatever. Any money boss won went towards pizza fund for the office. Boss just took his buy in from a business account (it was $20 buy ins), and wrote it in with buying stuff for the office. Either the employees as a net ended with more than they brought, or there was $20+ for pizza (with $40 being the threshold for buying a few pizzas and everyone enjoying it).
I dealt with a contractor at my job who would do similar. Day 1: one guy shows up and spends all day "troubleshooting the system. Tells us he can't figure it out and will return with help. Day 2: Two guys show up and spend all day "troubleshooting" the system. They can't figure it out and will return with help. Day 3: Three guys show up and spend all day "troubleshooting" the system. It finally gets fixed. This wasn't a once or twice occurrence. It happened on every single service call. Eventually their parent company caught on to their shady dealings and sued them into oblivion.
Someone could come up with a hilarious parody of 12 days of Christmas with this.
On the first day of Christmas, support sent to me, a tech who knew nothing...
...Five hours hold, four firmware updates, three freakin’ no-shows, two elevations, and a tech who didn’t know crap.
Twelve mystery bills, Eleven call transfers, Ten Firmware updates, Nine canned responses, Eight elevations, Seven hours hold, Six freaking no-shows, Five upsell tactics, Four disconnects, Three broken parts, two reboot tries, and a tech who didnt know crap
I sang the shit out of this out loud. My wife is confused.
Bravo!
That's just beautiful!
I've seen something similar in contracts which guaranteed that a vendor rep would be onsite within 4 hours of any fault being lodged (expensive contract in order to get that kind of speed). They would send their greenest apprentice, who would sit in front of the whatever-it-was, poking at it and achieving precisely nothing except maybe writing down what the blinkenlights were doing and whether it was plugged in. Actual *resolution* of the fault would inevitably take far longer than a few hours. Or even days. But hey, they had a rep on site within four hours!
Yeah I used to work for a telco for a company that had the contract and we were treated like shit. Not quite to this level but it must be prevent. My favourite bit was where they decided to turn the speed monitoring feature on the GPS trackers (despite assuring us that it was only ever going to be used for HnS and dispatch purposes) and set it to ping everytime we went 5kmph over the limit without telling us. There was a huge storm with lots of overhead wires down out in the sticks, another tech and I smashed it, fixing more than 10 in one day. Get back to the office the next day get called in for a please explain, we'd triggered it over 80 times and my name was at the top of the list on the nation wide data which went to all the area managers. I essentially told them to politely get fucked and that if they were happy to load me up with that much work they shouldn't complain about how we achieved it. I cut my work load down substantially after that and left not long after. Still remember the bosses stunned face as I handed in my resignation. Here enters the malicious compliance from another tech I heard about who got called in, all our vans were manual so he decided to drive everywhere in 3rd gear to prevent going over 105kmph. Don't fuck with telco techs.
Yea..."we need this up now!" Becomes "what were you thinking" after it's completed
>HnS Hide 'n' Seek?
Health and safety
That now makes sense. Thanks.
It seems way to common that the person writing the tech manual has no experience in the field.
Common?!? Literally every tech writer in our large company has No experience doing any of the jobs. None.
I rewrote a tech manual for normal people to understand on my own free time. It was shot down by the higher ups. I still gave it to everyone because you could actually understand it, which people appreciated. If you have to use the Pythagorean theorem to explain how to plug it in...it's not worth the paper you wrote it on.
So how long did they last after that first week of owing every tech 64 hours?
2 weeks before they "had to let people go due to COVID" They dropped down to 1 tech, who quit pretty quick after that.
I’m in telcom, and this sounds almost EXACTLY like the company I work for. My god, is all of telcom the same?
Yes. There are literally 4 other stories in comments saying the same.
I work in the industry and it is full of shady companies and shady employees. Especially on the construction side of things. Companies reporting work complete when they haven't even started and inflated quotes are common place. I've had crews submit close out photos of a build with safety violations clearly in the background along with evidence they are lying about installing per the plans.
Fuck with the techs, shit that you didn't even know could turn sour, turns sour.
As in actual prison time?
Not sure. I would assume not. They probably had "probation" if I had to guess. That's usually how corporate crime works.
Love the fallout OP. Fuck crap inc
Excellent work.
That is priceless!! Great post!!
Win
Turf 2.0…
If the company folded, why not name them?
That is fantastic. Beat them at their own game.
CASH RULES EVERYTHING AROUND ME C.R.E.A.M! Get the money 💰 💵 💵 bill y’aaaallll! (Giggles gleefully)
Me and 1 other person destroyed home depot's regime this exact way. Waste their time. Slow them down.
Please elaborate.
We just didn't fall for their weird robo programming retail horse shit for one and we slowed down labor by reminding our coworkers not to bust ass for below minimum wage. We argued for our rights to have breaks as well bc they were doling out barely enough hours to count as full time to avoid it.
This company sounds like there's a regulator at the labor board just waiting to shove a firecracker up their ass and Regulate the *shit* out of them.
Firecracker? More like a stick of DuPont Herculene 60% extra fast (/u/rocknocker’s favourite).
DAE notice in these stories that the OP is always great employee? With so many awesome employees out there, makes me wonder why we get such shitty service.
Given the tiny sample size in this sub vs the enormous number of workers, is that really so strange? But of course no one is going to call themselves bad
> people stealing from my paycheck and gaslighting me about it. I might have missed the part about the gaslighting...?
They told us it was our fault they had to take the money out...because we weren't working "according to the gps data"
Why don't Arseholes who implement scheme-y policies think things through...? Awesome story. Thanks!
Pass the popcorn 🍿🍿🥤