Malicious Compliance

[REPOST] I used to be an assistant golf course superintendent. One day my boss had me spraying chemicals on the fairways.

As I was spraying, some of our employees were having an issue with their machine. I stopped to help them and my boss pulls up and starts flipping out on me saying if I'm spraying fairways, that's all I need to be doing is spraying fairways. Not anything else. Okay, no problem.

A couple weeks later, the exact same scenario happened. I was spraying and some employees needed help. I ignored them and just kept on spraying. Their machine was broken down for nearly half an hour in the middle of the fairway during play before my boss rode around again and saw.

He came up to me livid and was saying that if I'm spraying fairways and I see someone needs help, I need to be able to break off and help them, that's part of being a manger.

I told him I didn't understand, because two weeks ago he explicitly told me to ONLY spray and reminded him of how he got mad when I did exactly that. He just stared at me for a second and then drove away in his golf cart. He came back a few holes later to apologize and says he did remember telling me that, and from now on I should just use my best judgement. uh-duh!!!