Malicious Compliance

To understand the context: this happened around 15 years ago, when automation was still somewhat new.

I was working as a sales representative. My teams consisted of 2 people: me and C. We had a competition with other teams across the business and I was determined to win as the price was quite a nice bonus. Our job: who had the most sales won. There was a second price of who reached the most customers.

I was determined to win so I thought what I could do best to make sure me and C were most efficient and came up with some simple automation solutions (simple excel macros) and templates, that would decrease our time to type and generate a customer offer from around 15 minutes / offer to 2 minutes. Also I realised I was better at admin stuff and C was better at talking with people. So for 6 months we were amazing. C was taking order after order from new and established clients, I was processing them. I was finding new potential clients and passing over the list to C to contact them. I was still taking orders myself but only from established clients as I had no time to create rapport with new ones. We were taking and processing around 25 orders/ day between ourselves. We were the best team by far.

But we didn’t win. We were disqualified due to my automations because they considered them cheating. C got mad at me and told me that my automations caused us to loose, and he could achieve the same high number even without them. So I decided to stop using my automations, and to stop processing both of our orders. I was doing about 7 orders/ day now, C was doing around 9. I was leaving work at 5, C would work overtime until half 7.

After 2 months of this I was pulled in a meeting by the Sales Director to discuss my teams decrease in productivity and motivation. I told him it is caused by me not using my automations. His reply was that young people are always looking at a screen thinking it could solve their issues. He also reprimanded me when for not having team spirit and not working overtime (unpaid) to help C. Hearing that, I started laughing hysterically and couldn’t stop. It got so bad that the Sales Director got a panicked looked on his face and started scrambling for a glass of water hoping the cold water would help calm me down. It didn’t. I gave my immediate resignation and left out the company building still laughing. The receptionist couldn’t understand what was going on with me leaving and laughing and later told me I looked like a crazy person in that moment.

I blame the stress of that situation…