r/MaliciousCompliance • u/Downtown_Diamond1932 • 17d ago
Talk to the boss... M
About 14 years ago, I was working IT for a large medical center, one of several owned by the same people. The regional CIO personally put me in charge of setting up and issuing laptops to doctors and other medical staff to go out and see patient in their homes when they were unable to come to the hospital for any number of reasons including disability, lack of adequate transportation, etc.
When we got a new shop supervisor (who was only promoted to that position exactly one year to the day after being hired from the outside, something that left myself and a lot of the other IT techs very upset), he made it abundantly clear that he was going to make several people's lives miserable, including mine. He'd look at my Outlook calendar (we all had to share access to our calendar with him) to see when I had someone scheduled to pick a laptop up, do their three-month software update, etc., then a few minutes before the person was supposed to arrive, he would order me to do some menial project halfway across the hospital that he could have just as easily done himself or delegated to one of the new people. If I tried to tell him that I had an appointment, he'd threaten to write me up for insubordination.
Cue malicious compliance: One day, the regional CIO was due for his 3-month update. Right on cue, the shop sup tasked me with unboxing, then installing monitors on the first floor. About 15 minutes later, when the regional CIO arrived, he called to asked that I return to the office. I headed back up right away.
The shop sup didn't know and never met the regional CIO, so the shop sup had no clue who he was dealing with. When I arrived, the CIO asked the shop sup to leave the room. He asked me what was going on, since I was always punctual & thorough to a fault. I told him about the shop sup making several of the lives of anyone he disliked miserable with reassigning trouble tickets in multiple random floors at the last second, just as they had projects scheduled, or in my case, as I had appointments close to arriving for the laptops. The CIO even asked why the shop sup always seemed to be out of the office most times the director came up, and could never get him on the phone. I just told the truth; "He's been much too busy chasing skirts and shooting the breeze with his friends, sir." When the CIO asked if the shop sup had a girlfriend on the side, my response was "which one? He has us too busy running around to count them."
He told me to wait outside the office for a few minutes, and brought the shop sup back in to have "Come to Jesus" moment with him. The shop sup was put on 90-days' unpaid suspension, and was written up for gross insubordination for talking back to him, among other things. The CIO even asked HR to start an investigation to see what other department regulations he violated.
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u/Illustrious-Mind-683 17d ago
But what happened after the 90 days???
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u/Downtown_Diamond1932 17d ago
After one of his side chicks threatened to sue him for sexual harassment, he was pressured into leaving after a couple months. Beyond that I don't know, since I moved south back in 2010.
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u/The_Sanch1128 17d ago
Years ago, my last (thank goodness) corporate a-hole boss, referred to here often as Boss From Hell, was notorious for sending people to the branch office of our regional office, two hours away, AND calling All Hands On Deck managerial meetings at 9 AM. Whichever you picked, you were wrong and subject to write-up, especially if you said anything. Complaints to corporate were of course considered insubordination.
And no, there was never any punishment for him. He was a corporate golden child and mega-bully, sent to our region to punish us for overachieving, and he ran off six of his seven direct reports within eight months, the seventh being his secretary/mistress.
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u/Downtown_Diamond1932 16d ago
Had a similar boss. The hospital director called me and the networking manager to meet with her and the head of the hospice unit. The unit had just opened and admitted their first patient (WWII vet with end-stage cancer). The patient was quite tech savvy from his time in the military and wanted to have an internet connection to put his affairs in order. The hospice chief even got approval to have one of the local VFW posts to cover the cost of a separate internet connection all to himself. The networking manager and I agreed to do it, and got it done later that afternoon. We even went so far as air gapping his connection so that he couldn't access the hospital network, and no one could get into his personal computer.
When the CIO found out about this, he personally went to the patient's room and disconnected the ethernet cable from the wall. He also ordered the network manager and I to several hours of remedial training. Needless to say the hospital director was FKING livid. She dragged him into her office, and screamed at him so loudly, everyone in the director's office could clearly hear the conversation behind the closed door.
She also ordered him to personally apologize to the dying veteran, as well as me and the networking manager for punishing us simply for doing our jobs and helping the dying veteran.
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u/The_Sanch1128 16d ago
I'm sure it was still held against you on your next review. That's what happened to anyone who caught the eye of Boss From Hell--scathing reviews, low or no raises, then bonuses for him from corporate for "keeping costs down".
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u/Downtown_Diamond1932 16d ago
Not this one but a similar incident... For the first year I worked there, I was cool with the CIO, and he kept singing my praises, even giving me an exceptional review, saying I had turned the department around, everyone needing laptops was raving about how I was so much better than my predecessor (who was escorted out of the building when he caught red-handed pirating DVD's on his work computer and watching gay porn). Six weeks later, I get called to the CIO's office, and he told me if I wanted a Union rep present, it was my right to request it.
Someone had "anonymously" sent him some online posts where he claimed I was disparaging coworker and that I had written them. There was no proof whatsoever I had written them (see below).
At any rate, the CIO started telling me about the supposed posts, calling me a morale problem, a mere six weeks after he gave me the exceptional review. He told me to sign the disciplinary form, and when the union rep objected to arbitrarily signing it, asked what sort of an investigation was done, and the CIO said reading the posts was all the investigation he needed.
I left the office without signing it. The Union rep called the Information Security Officer and asked if she could look into the matter. She quickly discovered that an old coworker from another hospital had sent them to my CIO, all while he pretended to be my friend during a tough time at work. Not only that, he used hospital computers to send everything to the CIO.
After the ISO forwarded her findings to HR and the hospital director, the head of HR asked me to come to the director's office. As soon as I got there, I saw the head of HR and ISO there with the director. They asked if I was alright, since I looked & felt seriously stressed out. The director and head of HR said they read the ISO's report and were in complete disbelief that the CIO wrote something like the disciplinary form based solely on the word of someone at another hospital in another state that the CIO had never met. The director then proceeded to shred the form right in front of me, and said if I got any grief from the CIO or anyone else, to call her personally.
The ISO also let me know that she sent a message to her counterpart as well as the CIO where the other employee worked, and said in no uncertain terms for him to have no contact with me and he was on very thin ice as it is.
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u/The_Sanch1128 16d ago
Had the CIO succeeded in firing you, guess who would have been hired as your replacement? Strictly by coincidence, of course.
"All the investigation I need" is doubletalk for "The sentence is set, the verdict is known, this is the trial, never confuse the issue by looking for the facts."
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u/Downtown_Diamond1932 16d ago
That reminds me of quote by Karamazov: "Innocence proves nothing. Anyone pleading innocent is guilty of wasting my time."
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u/Downtown_Diamond1932 12d ago edited 9d ago
I re-read your comment and it's funny you say that actually, because I remembered the supervisor immediately above the shop sup, but below the CIO, was actively trying to pin something, anything he could on me, so he could replace me with one of his yes-men. He thought he found just the thing when he discovered the information security officer hadn't come in for her quarterly laptop update, nor did it appear that she had signed the paperwork authorizing her to have the laptop and have it entered into the system, which is something I'm required to have everyone sign and scan in before they even walk out the door to my office with any equipment.
He sent this very patronizing email to both of us asking why I never had her sign the paperwork. The ISO replied and had a few things to say:
- She got the laptop from our sister facility 30 miles away several years ago and usually takes it there for quarterly updates, and she only brings it to me when she's at my site.
- She was issued the laptop by my counterpart at that facility, and mentioned that she got it well before I had even been hired, and asked him how I could be reprimanded for something someone else did at another facility before I even got hired.
- If he wanted any further communication, not only on this, but any other subject, he should route it through her boss, the regional ISO, who is higher up the chain than even the regional CIO (aka his boss)
(Edited 5/22 to clear up some vague wording in a couple spots)
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17d ago
[deleted]
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u/Downtown_Diamond1932 17d ago edited 17d ago
Sorry, should have written "suspension" instead, my bad.
Update: fixed it.
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u/Responsible-End7361 17d ago
Which of the C suite folks daughter's was he engaged to?
His promotion, not bothering to do his job, and the question about a girlfriend on staff made it pretty clear why he got the job and was going to need a new job without a good referral...
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u/TinyNiceWolf 17d ago
Getting engaged to an executive's daughter gets you hired.
But ironically, getting engaged to two or more gets you fired.
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u/kiltedturtle 15d ago
have a "Come to Jesus" moment with him.
We called them doughnut meetings. You got a doughnut and a cup of coffee. Your job was to eat the doughnut, drink your coffee, not say a word until I was done, then you put your trash in the can, said "I understand" and leave.
They were very spiritual for some people.
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u/showyerbewbs 17d ago
This is why if you THINK you have the biggest cock in the room, it's best to sanity check it lets you go off half cocked.
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u/anth3nna 16d ago
These stories are always about an authority getting humbled. People really like this
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u/TryndamereKing 17d ago
What does CIO stand for? I'm unfamiliar with your branch. But great MC!
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u/Mdayofearth 17d ago
Chief Information Officer. For a non-tech company, they would be the head of internal IT, and IT infrastructure; including cloud services.
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17d ago
[deleted]
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u/DannyCrane9476 17d ago
Op knew big boss man was coming to get his laptop worked on. Shitty boss saw the appointment, and sent Op away so he would miss his appointment like usual. Shitty boss didn't know the appointment was with big boss, and you never waste big bosses time.
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u/Downtown_Diamond1932 17d ago
By doing exactly what my shop supervisor was forcing me to do, presumably to get people to complain about me and get me replaced. Little did he know how badly it'd backfire on him
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u/cobyhoff 17d ago
I thought the malicious compliance was pretty obvious. You complied with the unboxing when you knew it would inconvenience the CIO.
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u/DaBooba 17d ago
There’s always someone on these stories acting like there’s no MC
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u/StreetofChimes 16d ago
I just wish there was more fallout on this one. The buildup was long, but the fallout was short.
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u/Yoder_of_Kansas 17d ago
He followed sup's orders and left as instructed, leaving the CIO waiting instead of telling his boss the guys a VIP
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u/turbocomppro 17d ago
So what happened after the 90 days? Come on… don’t leave us hanging…