The Malicious Compliance Speedrun Any%

Title: The Malicious Compliance Speedrun Any%

There is a specific, almost artistic pleasure in watching someone follow bad instructions to the letter. It’s the bureaucratic equivalent of a perfectly executed video game glitch, where the player clips through the floor of a boss arena by doing exactly what the game told them to do, just a little too well. The post in question is a masterclass in this genre. An HR manager, described with the surgical precision of “old-school old-battleaxe,” issues a threat wrapped in a directive: “Report everything that happens on these files - or else.”

The OP’s response was not rebellion; it was reverence. They began filing reports of such exhaustive, granular detail that the act of reporting became the primary work. Every minor query, every system hiccup, every single digital breath was documented with the solemnity of a court stenographer transcribing the apocalypse. The system, designed to create a veneer of control, was forced to ingest a tidal wave of its own demanded data. The manager, who had mistaken pedantry for power, was now drowning in the very paperwork they had sanctified.

As one astute commenter, Kramerica, notes, companies often opt to keep the “problematic employee” instead of questioning the “insane turnover” they cause. This is a fundamental law of corporate physics: a stable, predictable problem is often preferred to the uncertainty of a solution. The battleaxe manager was a known quantity, a tutorial boss everyone had already learned to dodge. Replacing her would mean learning a new boss’s attack patterns, and who has the time for that?

The story’s postscript is delivered with the dry finality of a patch note for a canceled game. “I was laid off 3 m later.” Another commenter, mizinamo, deadpans, “Three minutes later – damn, that’s rough,” perfectly capturing the absurd timescale of corporate memory. The reward for a flawless malicious compliance run is not a promotion; it’s a severance package. The company, having identified the symptom—the person flooding the system with reports—instead of the cause—the manager who ordered it—simply control-alt-deleted the player. The final, unspoken lesson is as old as work itself: when you’re told to document your own demise, make sure the receipts are impeccable.