'She must go on leave and I won't hear any excuses!': Worker gets double leave when Karen boss forces them to take leave and forgets to document it

Brad Dickson • Managing Editor

Jun 23, 2023 12:00 PM EDT

Throughout your life, your superiors' insistence that you adhere to cumbersome processes and procedures will be a literal thorn in your side, causing you wasted hours and undue stress as you attempt to follow them. But—occasionally, things might just work out in your favor. When they do, it's usually owing to the fact that the superiors, who are insisting that these processes be followed, aren't nearly as good at following them themselves as they would like you to believe. In fact, they may reveal themselves to be willfully negligent of any and all processes that they've been championing, spending their days at their desks playing Candy Crush on their phone and texting their friends—who also somehow ended up in management positions and are busy doing the same thing.

This paralegal, Sally, was one of the lucky ones who benefited from her Karen boss's insistence that she follow the process, forcing her to take six weeks of leave in order to reduce her leave balance. So, Sally relented, wasting her leave while taking an unplanned six-week vacation that would bankrupt her remaining leave. Before leaving on leave, she submitted all the proper paperwork according to the process. Unbeknownst to her, Karen herself ended up taking time off during that period, except Karen had been so negligent about her job that her stand-in was forced to scrap her entire office, binning every bit of misfiled paperwork she could find—including Sally's leave paperwork.

This meant that when Sally returned, she still had the same leave balance, had been paid normally, and now had to take another eight-week vacation in order to, again, reduce her leave balance. Nice.

Read on for this delicious meal of malicious compliance. Next, check out this workplace that tried to charge their workers a petty long-distance call fee and had their payments maliciously complied to.