It’s that time again to remind people to never mess—in any way, shape, form, capacity, whatever—with IT guys.

Having devious things done to your computer is a given and actually expected if you irk an IT guy something fierce. They can, however, resort to much more colossal forms of retribution. You know, like malicious compliance.

That is, malicious compliance with a manager who didn’t let an IT get in a word edgewise about something the manager thought was a personal project being done during work, but the CEO had to step in.

You wouldn’t want to get on an IT guy’s bad side—and no, it’s not just because they might just not issue new batteries for your wireless mouse

Image credits: Field Engineer / pexels (not the actual photo)

No, this time it’s something more devious, and that is malicious compliance whereby a manager had to get the talk from the CEO

Image credits: Negative Space / pexels (not the actual photo)

Image credits: Felicity Tai / pexels (not the actual photo)

Image credits: smohk1

All because the manager just wouldn’t let the IT guy get a word in edgewise, demanding that he make a call; he didn’t know to whom

The best malicious compliance stories are the simple ones, frankly speaking.

An IT guy by the nickname of u/smohk1 recently shared how one day the company’s CEO asked him to do some work on a personal laptop. It was a slow day, and this was the CEO, so why not.

Soon after, a manager comes in, asks for some work to be done and OP replies that he’s second in line. Some quick investigation on the part of the manager leads him to start preaching about how personal projects shouldn’t take precedence over business-related ones.

That’s all fine and dandy, but the manager then insisted that OP call the person to whom the laptop belonged and explain to them that it is unacceptable for OP to be working on personal stuff at work.

The thing was, the manager didn’t know who the laptop belonged to, and insisted on the call so much that OP simply maliciously complied without an explanation.

What happened next was that OP initiated the call, explained word-for-word what the manager said, and then passed on the phone to the manager as per the request of the man on the other end of the phone call.

The manager almost immediately understood the error of his ways, but could only really blame himself for the reaction he had.

Image credits: fauxels / pexels (not the actual photo)

Folks loved the story—so much, in fact that it got a bit over 16K upvotes

A lot of folks came out with their own stories to tell. One person had an analogous encounter, except it was in the military, and appropriately dubbed militious compliance by another commenter.

Another person told a bit of a reverse story where a new CEO asked all the chiefs to convene for a meeting and give some context as to how much revenue they had attracted to the company. The first and bravest soul was the guy from IT and he didn’t have any idea how much money his department brought in, but he was very confident in saying that nobody else could do it without him.

Besides stories, some folks were fairly certain that the manager will never question OP ever again as they used the excuse on several occasions (saying Mr. Big Guns Upstairs asked for it) and nobody ever questioned that either.

The bottom line among commenters was to never demand anything from IT as it never ends well. Make requests, but never demand.

Image credits: Mizuno K / pexels (not the actual photo)

But that’s not the only thing you should never do with IT people—there’s a number of very particular things that also make it into the blacklist

The worst thing you could do when talking to an IT guy is to lie about a computer problem. Remember, computers work in a very logical way, and if the IT guy follows the breadcrumbs, they will most definitely find out.

Also, when explaining a problem, be as specific as you can. Saying something like “…then something came up on screen and then it just broke…” isn’t helpful. What came up on the screen? Did you read it? That error message makes all the difference in the diagnosis.

Another thing that might be handy to avoid is to badmouth your computer and say that you don’t want to know what the problem is, demanding that they just fix it. Unfortunately, you would want to know as [1] if it’s something simple, you can fix it yourself next time, [2] knowing what it is means learning the best practice in avoiding it next time, and [3] you can’t avoid computers, so get to know them and you will have a smoother ride.

And just be nice to IT people, gosh.

Image credits: cottonbro studio / pexels (not the actual photo)

But before you go offering some tea or coffee to your company’s IT guy, why not leave a comment sharing your thoughts on any of this in the comment section below!

Commenters were all over the story on Reddit, but first things first, what’s a mangler? It’s actually manager

Folks praised the IT guy for this simple, yet effective malicious compliance

And if folks weren’t appreciating the story, they were sharing their own

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