You can’t choose your boss… well, all right, you can, but it’s more complicated than just simply choosing one, and most days you’re gonna just accept that you have the boss that was dealt to you by fate. There, happy with the technicality?!

Anywho, if a boss ends up being rough around the edges—like, seriously bent out of shape and bitter to the core—there are a few ways to approach it. Redditors, however, often practice one of the best (albeit not necessarily the most civil) approaches to solving conflict in a corporate setting, and that is malicious compliance. All because of 3 minutes.

More Info: Reddit

Working is hard as it is without a micromanaging boss yapping about 3 minutes of work within the context of 20 hours

Image credits: Collab Media (not the actual photo)

An employee of 25 years had that happen to him, and he approached it in the most appropriate way possible—with malicious compliance

Image credits: u/irritatingfarquar

OP started adhering to the petty micromanagement and immediately productivity dropped and the manager was called in for a talk with his boss. It didn’t go well

Image credits: Gui Salcedo (not the actual photo)

The story goes that Redditor u/irritatingfarquar, an employee of 25 years at a water company repair crew, once had a monster of a shift. Work started at 7:30 in the morning on a Friday and ended at 3:15 the next night on Saturday. That’s nearly 20 hours of work.

In light of this, OP left a mere 3 minutes early, at 3:12AM. While it seems very human to do so given the circumstances, his boss was not all that happy about it, even threatening him with the loss of his job. OP figured that if the boss is going to be that petty, he might as well be fired from it. By that, we mean he got off the emergency contact list for extra coverage, he stopped coming 20 minutes early, and it all became a strict 7:30AM to 5:30PM affair. Good luck, Mr. Boss!

Well, sure enough, productivity is down and the boss-man is struggling to get coverage for emergencies. And so he gets called into his boss’ office, only to spin some ludicrous story about OP starting a revolt. This immediately gets debunked when OP comes in to explain what’s what. Given the combination of OP’s impeccable reputation and the fact that hotshot boss abused a tracking system that led to this lovely mess, boss-man was let go.

As an added bonus, it turns out the boss’ bonuses were tied to performance, so when OP’s productivity dropped from 7 to 4 jobs a day, he also took a hit at his finances.

Image credits: Mikhail Nilov (not the actual photo) 

Bored Panda reached out to OP for an interview. He explained that after reading similar stories on Reddit, he just had to share his own, which drew attention on Reddit—over 16,500 upvotes garnered (94%) positive.

In our interview, OP explained why the boss was so bitter over those 3 minutes. You would think that he might have been having a bad day or something, but no. “He was going through the department being an [a hole in the bottom (of the sea)] to everyone over different stupid issues,” said OP.

Well, in that case, this calls for some more ramped up malicious compliance, right? Alas, it didn’t happen, but OP did note that there was potential:

“I could have put in a bullying and victimization complaint against him, as the company was red hot on those types of issues, or completely dropped him in it staff wise by jacking the job in and going elsewhere to work. I had been asked numerous times to go work for other companies and could have left that day, made a phone call and started working for someone else the next morning and taken half a dozen other lads with me.”

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The best part is that the boss got angry over something some call a non-issue. OP said that nobody in his entire career had ever made an issue over a few minutes before. Within context, everyone knew how hardworking the workers were and how much benefit that brought in to the company. So, the boss actually screwed himself big time. “It all comes down to the old adage of ‘don’t try to fix something that isn’t broken,’” concluded OP.

Image credits: Mikhail Nilov (not the actual photo) 

Saying folks loved the story would be an understatement given the upvotage mentioned previously. And even one commenter asked the million dollar question: when will new managers learn not to screw with veteran employees? Some speculated that you don’t really hear about the ones who don’t screw up at work.

Others thought that referring to the boss as Mr. Numbnuts was too kind, but compromises have to be made in civil subreddits. OP mentioned that there is an actual name the boss is called and it would break the internet if mentioned.

OP was also very active in the comment section. This is where we learn that this happened a while ago and OP has already retired, giving him loads of time to recall stories like this. This is also where we learn OP explained how he, following the boss’ tantrum, would often leave work for the on-call crew, racking up huge overtime payouts for the company. It only makes the malicious compliance sweeter.

You can check out the post in its entirety here. But before you do that, why not share some of your ideas, opinions and stories of similar malicious caliber (not in a micromanagey way) in the comment section below!

Folks online loved the story, with OP making an active appearance throughout much of the comment section

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