IT employee gets reprimanded over not taking his lunch on time, so he complies during a critical outage that turned down the network in which he can’t really do anything: ‘Boss is standing at my desk when I get back today.’ – FAIL Blog

Malicious compliance, the only way to work in the corporate world right now.

You go to work as an IT employee, and something happens, a system went down, the wifi disconnected, whatever. When that occurs, you start fixing it, not realizing it’s already 12:30 and you have between 12 and 1 pm to take your lunch. You decide to ignore that, as this problem is far more important, and for one day you can take your lunch at another time. When you fix the issue, it is already past 1 o’clock, but you go to lunch anyway. After eating, you go back to your desk only to find your boss being mad at you for taking your lunch at a time that isn’t the assessed one. There is no room for explaining, so you just comply.

A couple of days later, a power outage makes the whole network go down. This is critical, but it is already 12:30, so you can’t stay, as you don’t want your boss to be mad at you again. You go to lunch, and after 30 minutes you’re back. At your desk is your boss, who was waiting for you to come back. He isn’t happy, and as soon as he sees you, he just says: “The network is up, by the way!” You are done. Officially, you have a target on your back, and it wasn’t really malicious compliance. It was just doing what you were told to avoid having your boss mad at you again. That is the corporate world.

Now this Reddit user who shares this story is looking for some help in the matter. But the reality is that he already has the target on his back. They are going to be looking more closely at him, just waiting for any tiny mistake to get him fired. So if he asked me, I would tell him to start updating his resume.