# The Owner Who Speedran Her Own Firing Argument

There’s a specific flavor of management failure that deserves academic study: the boss who issues an order, watches it executed with surgical precision, then acts personally betrayed by the results. This Reddit post documents exactly that speedrun.

The setup is tight. Upscale cafe. Mother’s Day—the single most important revenue day. Supervisor (our narrator) runs the bakery section and, crucially, knows the actual demand curve. Owner, absent as advertised, calls with an edict: increase the daily order. Narrator, operating in reality, suggests this is a bad call based on, you know, having worked there. Owner doubles down. Narrator complies. The Mother’s Day rush arrives. They absolutely crush it with the extra stock. And then—here’s the control group of bad ideas kicking in—the owner nearly fires them for doing exactly what they were told to do.

The comments section is a chorus of people recognizing this as a common genus of chaos. One user nails it: “Classic sign of poor managerial skills.” Another notes the owner “wanted to get rid of you from the start”—which tracks. You don’t almost fire someone for executing your own directive unless you were already looking for an exit ramp. This reads less like a business decision and more like a boss who needed the employee to be wrong so badly that reality itself became the problem.

The real postmortem here isn’t about malicious compliance—it’s about the gap between giving orders and accepting accountability for those orders. The narrator did the one thing a subordinate is supposed to do: follow instructions. They even tried the upgrade move (respectfully suggesting a different path) and got overruled. At that point, you’re not making choices; you’re executing policy. But bosses like this seem to operate under a different contract: follow my orders and be responsible for predicting that I’ll regret them.

The unspoken moral, buried in a comment about putting in effort like an owner instead of an employee: sometimes the most malicious compliance is just doing the job you were hired to do and watching someone else panic when it works.