Expense Report: Any% Glitchless

The internet, ever keen to catalog the subtle art of corporate self-immolation, recently unearthed a particularly elegant specimen from r/MaliciousCompliance. The premise: a mandatory work training in England, 2015, where our protagonist, already fluent in the subject matter, was dispatched purely for a certificate. A minor inconvenience, until the boss, in a masterclass of managerial short-sightedness, decided to reject an expense claim, directing the employee to “read the policy for guidance.” This, as it turns out, was less a directive and more a low-probability critical hit on the boss’s own fiscal judgment. The policy document, likely a dusty PDF last updated when flip phones were cutting-edge tech, stipulated a generous “£12 for an evening meal”—a figure SubjectiveAssertive correctly deemed “bloody tight” even a decade prior. But it also, crucially, permitted daily mileage claims and parking for those commuting home each night. This is where the boss’s instructional advice transitioned from firm to fatal. Instead of a single, straightforward hotel booking, the Redditor meticulously mapped out a daily round trip for the entire week. Drifterlady’s recollection of a Sevenoaks-to-Heathrow commute for a Belfast day trip provides a useful approximation of the fuel burn. Parking fees were added, naturally. And naturally, as Help_meToo observed, this entire exercise in bureaucratic forensics wasn’t conducted off-the-clock. It was a paid deep-dive into the ancient texts of corporate policy, effectively using company resources to optimize company discomfort. The final cost, a beautiful inversion of the boss’s initial parsimony, predictably dwarfed the original, unapproved expense. It’s the digital equivalent of denying a five-dollar coffee only to accidentally purchase the entire coffee bean farm via obscure legal precedent. As cbelt3 succinctly put it, this was a textbook example of “penny wise, pound foolish.” The quiet satisfaction derived from such an outcome, as BodaciousVermin pointed out, lay in the boss having to “kiss goodbye that bit of power he thought that he had over you and the team.” This wasn’t merely about money or a certificate; it was a pure, unadulterated demonstration that sometimes, the most devastating move is simply to adhere strictly to the rules, especially when those rules are written by someone else’s past self, blissfully unaware of future consequences.