'Don't stop baking until I say stop': Assistant manager berates baker at bagel shop for not cooking fast enough, malicious compliance ensues

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Ben Weiss • Writer and Editor
Mar 11, 2025 8:00 AM EDT

It's hard to comply with a manager's orders when their tone is decidedly out of line. Tone is everything in the workplace. If you need someone to complete something for you in a timely manner, be careful about how you phrase your mandate. You need something from them. The last thing you want is for them to resent you and intentionally do a bad job.

Here, we have an assistant manager who took things too far, and it finally backfired in a major way. This was the kind of person who enjoyed humiliating others in the workplace and in the most public way, so it was only a matter of time before they wanted to give her a taste of her own medicine.

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    PLAIN WHOLE WHEAT CINNAMON RAISIN
    via Zoshua Colah

  • This employee worked as a baker at a popular local bagel and sandwich establishment. Everything was going smoothly until the new Ms. Assistant Manager was transferred to this employee's location. She frequently berated her employees and clearly took a lot of pleasure in asserting her authority over others and humiliating them in front of their fellow workers.

    After she had caught wind that this employee was not her biggest fan from a friend who worked at her old location, Ms. Assistant Manager sought to punish this guy repeatedly at work. Well, by the time she ordered him to bake faster, he decided to comply with her orders, albeit maliciously.

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    When I was in college, I worked as a baker for a well-known regional bagel and sandwich chain. At some point an assistant manager transferred to my store who was the stereotypical petty,
    via Kaltastic84
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    power tripping, ridiculous manager you find in this type of job. Her specialty was yelling at and berating employees in front of customers. I will never not believe that she enjoyed publicly humiliating people.
    via Kaltastic84
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    It was tolerable until I agreed to cover a shift at the store she transferred from. Someone there asked me what I thought of her. I
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    thought I was careful as I just commented that she had very high expectations which were hard for some people to meet. Understatement of the year.
    via Kaltastic84
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    Well, this lovely person passed this back to her which shot me to the top of her sh list. What followed was a series of write- ups for egregious violations like missing some seeds when mopping the floor or not
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    emptying a garbage can that had a single paper towel in it. Lucky for me I was one of the few people there certified to run the ovens.
    via Kaltastic84
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    Cheezburger Image 10478418176
    via Unsplash+ (Levi Meir Clancy)
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    My opportunity for malicious compliance came one Saturday lunch time when a charter bus pulled up. I'd seen this before and knew that a bus full of people buying sandwiches is equivalent
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    to 2-3 people bringing bagels to work. Barely a blip compared to morning rush. I went to the counter to help and Ms. Assistant Manager yells at me to get back into the kitchen and start baking
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    more. I tried to tell her we were fine but as soon as I opened my mouth she yelled "Shut your god mouth, do what I told you, and don't stop baking until I say stop!"
    via Kaltastic84
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    Two important things to know is that first, when I took my certification test, they told me I passed it with the second fastest time on record for the local franchise. The second thing is that the ovens were adjustable.
    via Kaltastic84
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    You could turn up the heat to speed up the cooking process. I went back to the baking area, cranked up the oven and baked as fast as I possibly could. The ovens had 8 shelves, holding about 48 bagels each. Eventually
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    I had them all filled up and was only gated by how fast they could cook, and I could send them upfront. Ms. Assistant Manager was down at the register this whole time and was not paying
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    attention to stock levels in the bagel bins. I kept bringing out shelf after shelf. At one point, the bins were overflowing so I had to start putting them in extra bins we kept in the back. Once those were full, I started putting them in on metal trays.
    via Kaltastic84
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    The crowd finally did down and Ms. Assistant Manager finally looks at the bagel bins and realizes she never told me to stop. She asked me if there was anything still baking and I informed her that every shelf was
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    full. She lost it and started yelling that I was getting fired until multiple people pointed out that I just did exactly what she asked. The store manager ended up coming in and pretty much everyone told them the exact
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    same story. Ms. Assistant Manager had to bag up the mountains of excess bagels and drive them to all the other stores in the area so that they wouldn't go to waste. Even after that, we
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    still exceeded the allowed wastage for the day, and she was reprimanded. She still yelled at everyone after that but she was at least more careful in her wording.
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    stillnotelf Sounds like she's got the same managerial skills as the hole in the middle of a bagel.
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    Also I am VERY interested in an oven where you can go hotter to make things cook faster....what other foods does that work on?
    via Kaltastic84
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    Sea-Contact5009 Gotta love when they say it in front of an audience. Bakers kiss.
    via Kaltastic84

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workplace-stories work stories malicious compliance bosses baking workplace Horrible Bosses bagels bad bosses funny work stories malicious compliance reddit
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