'The charge was... malicious compliance': Tyrannical boss demands employee 'print out the internet', employee jams boss's office with 6 feet stack of paper

Eleonora Bader

Apr 11, 2023 10:00 AM EDT

This may be one of the best malicious compliance stories we've read to date, and the reason for that is the novelty, hilarity, and downright relatability of the details. A tyrannical boss had taken her reign over a government department where she was less than kind to her employees, OP included. At the time, OP was a technical writer and had been slowly transferring an old employee handbook into a modern and actually useful doc (ex: one page with policies and links to useful websites, like Office of Personal Management, forms for workman's comp, etc). OP's boss wanted the whole thing printed out ASAP, or rather, the next morning.

For those wondering 'what the heck', it might be worth mentioning that this was well over a decade ago. OP's boss wasn't happy with the 200 or so pages that OP printed, and proceeded to scream her lungs out, saying something like 'Do you think people can just go to a website when it is on paper? NO! Print everything out', and OP replied calmly (bless them) that the sites were pretty dense and deep, so it would be about 10,000 pages. Obviously, this boss did not calculate the meaning of those words, let alone think about the consequences, so all she said was 'I don't care'.

Alrighty then! OP began printing… and printing… and then printing some more. In fact, they printed so much that the piles of paper began exceeding 6 feet. What happened next is absolutely hilarious, scroll down and read all about it for yourself. For more stories like this, here is an employee who saved their company 20 million dollars in profits, but was offered a 2% promotion. The kicker is this was a Fortune 500 company, who were doing ridiculously well financially at the time.