Wife Demands That Her Husband Walk 10,000 Steps a Day At Work, Coworkers Come to His Support

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Ben Weiss • Writer and Editor
Nov 19, 2022 2:00 PM EST

Here's a rare and wholesome story about coworkers! Most of the time these days, you come across stories about awful people in the office, whether it's horrible bosses or annoying coworkers. Rarely do we come across a story where the good guys are your coworkers.

 

This thread was posted to Reddit's r/MaliciousCompliance subreddit by u/ronearc, who shared a story about his work colleague, Bob. Bob had recently survived a heart attack and was in recovery. Despite his doctor's orders, Bob's wife insisted that her husband walk 10,000 steps a day during work hours and purchased a pedometer (this was before the days of Fitbits) to make sure he got it done.

 

Bob's coworkers may not have been able to confront him about his relationship with his wife, but they were able to help him get to 10,000 steps by dividing and conquering. Keep scrolling below to see how they did it. For more tales of malicious compliance, check out this post about an apartment manager and a check for two cents. 

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  • 01
    Font - 10,000 steps a day or else! мос Years ago, long before smart phones or Fitbits, a coworker of mine, Bob, had a relatively mild heart attack. We joked in secret that it was caused by his wife, but the other secret is, we weren't really joking. She was awful. She was just an intolerable person, and no one liked her. I'm pretty sure Bob didn't like his own wife. If he did, it was probably Stockholm Syndrome.
    via u/ronearc
  • 02
    Font - At any rate, when Bob returned to work, he returned with a Pedometer clipped to his belt. Every day, Bob would walk as much as he could when he wasn't pinned down to his desk, but he was suffering and his work was suffering. As his supervisor at the time, I figured he was struggling with his recovery, so we just moved a lot of his work to others and left him with the cases he specialized in. That worked for everyone, because those cases drove others nuts and he was a whiz at them. His oth
    via u/ronearc
  • 03
    Font - However, at the end of his first full week back the issue became more clear. I overhead Bob's wife berating him in the parking lot because he didn't even meet half of his steps goal. Turns out, the Pedometer didn't come from his doctor; it came from his wife. She was demanding that Bob increase from his current -4,200 steps a day that were almost killing him to somehow 10,000 steps a day. "This will read at least 10,000 at the end of every workday, or it'll be your ," were her words.
    via u/ronearc
  • 04
    Font - Now, Bob was a tall guy with a long stride, so she was somehow expecting him to fit in over 6 miles of walking during his workday while recovering. But you know, since he'd had a heart attack, maybe she was just looking out for him, right? Nope. His doctor had actually cautioned him against overdoing it. He was only supposed to be walking 1.5 miles a day, and not all at once. But his wife wasn't having it. She demanded more, and he tried but wasn't doing so well. After another week of thi
    via u/ronearc
  • 05
    Font - Bob's pedometer just sat on the corner of his desk while he was working. If anyone had to walk down the hall or to the other building, they'd grab the pedometer on their way out of the office. Bob did have to tolerate another couple of a 3-chewings, because we ramped him up to 10,000 steps instead of jumping straight there. We figured that would be suspicious otherwise.
    via u/ronearc
  • 06
    Font - In the end, Bob got his 10,000 steps every day. Well, Bob's pedometer registered over 10,000 steps every day, and almost 1/3 of them were actually his steps. Bob was overjoyed to have the help, and we were all willing to keep the secret (because we were frightened of her turning on us). Teamwork makes the dream work.
    via u/ronearc
  • 07
    Font - motor1_is_stopping · 17 hr. ago Great system. Hope Bob is doing all right. At a previous job, quite a few years ago, we had a similar problem. The company decided that they would sign up for a health insurance program that was highly dependent on getting 10k steps per day.
    via u/ronearc
  • 08
    Font - They couldn't deny your health insurance, but they gave steep discounts for getting the 10k steps every day. Hundreds of dollars a month if you didn't meet your goals. This did not sit well with many people. In addition, everybody had to buy the specific pedometers that they had approved. Well, as they say, life finds a way. A device was created to be attached to a drill that would spin these pedometers at a rate that would count steps at a pretty remarkable rate. It would hold about 6 to
    via u/ronearc
  • 09
    Font - I couldn't even guess how many thousands of dollars of lost time this cost, as since there were 6-8 people that would get together at the same time each day - multiple times a day - to spin their pedometers, it became a natural gossip session.
    via u/ronearc
  • 10
    Mammal - ace_of_nations. 17 hr. ago It sounds like that woman was intentionally trying to provoke a deadly heart attack.
    via u/ronearc
  • 11
    Font - ronearc OP 17 hr. ago I don't care what the subject is, what your expertise is, or how little she knows about the subject, she'll often have a contary opinion and demand it should be treated as the Word of God. So, maybe she was trying to him off, but completely disregarding the doctor's orders and imposing her own unreasonable demand was totally on-brand for her.
    via u/ronearc
  • 12
    Font - One time, she'd made Bob apologize for insisting that Arkansas is a state. When it had been pointed out to her on a map, she claimed that was arr-KAN- zuss, and Bob was only calling it ARR- kan-saw out of ignorance. ...we may or may not have made a point of fitting "Arkansas" into discussions anytime she was in earshot. Since we dealt with state agencies, that wasn't hard. I've genuinely never known a more disagreeable person.
    via u/ronearc
  • 13
    Font - delicioustreeblood. 15 hr. ago This is abusive behavior and should be treated as such. Imagine if the roles were flipped and Bob was berating his wife at her work in front of her coworkers who then devised a plan to help her not get abused quite so much. Sickening.
    via u/ronearc
  • 14
    Font - stillnotelf 17 hr. ago This is way more wholesome than I would have expected. It depends on the pedometer of course but you can really ramp them up by just attaching a string and spinning them around in vertical circles. I used to cheat steps while in meetings with the pokemon heart gold pedometer this way.
    via u/ronearc
  • 15
    Font - 0₂ Pabst Malone - 17 hr. ago How's Bob doing these days? ADD Vote Reply Share ronearc OP 17 hr. ago It's been quite a long time, so I couldn't say. But by the time I left that job, about 18 months after the heart attack, he was doing almost half of his 10,000 steps. Even better (for Bob at least), his wife was spending a lot of time out of state taking care of her elderly mom.
    via u/ronearc
  • 16
    Font - Bob claimed his wife was just a younger version of her mom, so I like to imagine the wife was miserable at the same time Bob was doing comparatively great.
    via u/ronearc
  • 17
    Font - (5+²) PLE joppedi_72 17 hr. ago This becomes even more absurd if you take a recent study into acount that showed that above about 6000 steps the health benefits of walking declines down to mostly wasted effort. That said, this study was about meassuring the benefits of general everyday walking. Not if you went out for an hour of powerwalking.
    via u/ronearc
  • 18
    Font - Unhappy-Ninja-7684 · 13 hr. ago LOL- well done! Bud's wife bought him a fitbit and said he'd best get active. He sent me a short video of him in the backyard, feet up with a beer and his fitbit strapped on to his dogs leg. Dog was having a blast as dad was throwing the tennis ball for him. Said it took no time to get his daily 10,000 steps in :)
    via u/ronearc

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