This is my first time posting here, but I was implored by a current coworker to tell the tale of how I quit my horrible previous job. This post has bits and pieces from pettyrevenge, prorevenge, maliciouscompliance, and talesfromtechsupport, but whatever.
About the owners:
Around 10 years ago, I was freshly married and took a job working for a small mom and pop type operation that ran a half dozen gas stations a couple liquor stores, and a pair of restaurants. I was early 20s, had no real 40 hour a week work experience, and was sort of desperate to get anything so that I could start making stable money. I literally knew someone that worked for them, walked in and asked for a job like your grandpa says used to happen, and was hired on the spot.
The owners were married and were both nasty people who had run these businesses for almost thirty years. They treated all of their employees like garbage. The wife was mean and nasty and demeaning to everyone who worked for them, especially male employees. The husband, while appearing to be nice out loud, was exactly the same in a more subtle way. They were often feuding in their marriage, and made this every employees problem too.
Additionally, they were very predatory and hired ex-felons, single mothers, people with mental disorders, etc. This made them look good, but in reality, they liked desperate employees that they could exploit. More about this later.
A bit of background on my position:
I started off just working night shifts at the liquor store and gas stations, but after a few months I was asked to work a morning shift at one of the busier gas stations, and ended up being shoved into “opener” they didn't have “managers” because you can't pay a manager minimum wage. I made $7.25 for 1 year of “opening” and only got a raise to $8.00 due to a clerical error which they decided not to fix.
While running this store, I would open Mon-Fri and work 5AM-2PM, sometimes working Sat. Also, occasionally coming and unlocking and prepping a store for a Sat or Sun worker who wasn't savvy enough. I was also expected to be on call from 5AM-1AM any time I wasn't at my store to fix problems. I ordered all of the stuff that went in the store, worked with vendors to keep beverages, including beer stocked, wrote checks for basically anything that wasn't a monthly bill, and did a bit of the scheduling (I would be given a small pool of employees and be allowed to have a bit of input on when they worked, but ultimately I would get overruled as often as possible).
Eventually, I also ended up becoming the IT guy for all of the stores because almost no one else that worked for them was able to do anything. I set up new PoS systems for three of the gas stations, reimaged PCs in the business office, and in general was just the guy who knew how to plug things in. This led to me having administrator privileges on three PoS systems and all of the office computers. This part is very important for later, so hold on to this.
The crimes:
One of the many things that they did to save money was having employees work overtime “off the clock” and pay them straight cash. Most of their employees were down for this, and they literally had a separate time clock system where we would clock out at around 38 hours for the week, and commence to clock in with the old one. All of the newer time clock system was paid on paystubs like a normal job. Taxes were removed and all that good stuff. All the old time clock was just paid in cash in a separate envelope.
Please note that they kept extensive records of this in excel to be sure they didn't accidentally over pay an employee. I was later told the file was literally called “Records of Overtime paid in cash”. Very subtle.
The events that led to me leaving:
After nearly 3 years working for these people, the I had long been the owner's wife's whipping boy. She'd call to harass me as she drove to the office, usually hungover or still sauced up from the night before. She loved to tear me up because I was the only male “store opener” and she'd say things like “well you're a man so you're too stupid to check the finances or clean if I don't tell you exactly how to do things every day.” It was pretty awful and I was already dealing with a deteriorating marriage at home so my mental state was grim. It's very hard to articulate how bad this was. Imagine some older lady literally berating you for 30-90 minutes every day on the phone while you're working alone in a store and having to lay her down and deal with customers occasionally. I hated her with every fiber of my being and often wished I'd pick the phone up and find that she'd run her car off of a bridge.
The breaking point for me started when an employee called at midnight and I rushed over to find cops all over the store. Some perv had laid his junk on the table and she had literally beat it to a pulp with a roll of Grizzly Wintergreen pouches before he could pull back. (Funny story, this was in the local news, and I often had people ask if they could buy the roll that did this, I must have sold this roll 20 times over in three weeks.) This employee understandably ghosted and never showed up again. The wife-boss said she'd find someone to pick up her shifts as we had a week to do so, but failed to do so.
As I said above, they only wanted to pay overtime in pure cash under the table. I 100% refused to work on the old time clock, and told the husband-boss that if they ever wanted me working over 40 hours, they'd be paying me legitimately or not at all, and he'd decided not to push the issue, and made sure to never schedule me for doubles, extra shifts, etc. unless they were willing to pay me over time.
As you can imagine, that week I ended up getting a number of extra shifts. I'd go to work 5AM-1PM (wouldn't do my extra hour of paperwork) then go back in from 6PM-1AM. This was all annoying but I was clocking in and was going to get somewhere around 35-40 hours of over time, so I was a bit stoked. Imagine my shock when I got a paper check for around 30 hours, and then an envelope containing four crisp $100 dollar bills and a hand full of change.
I immediately checked with the husband, and he said “Sorry pal, my wife handles the accounting, you'll need to ask her.” As you can imagine, she basically told me to suck it up, and I told her that I would never work an hour of over time again. She laughed and said “We'll see” and it was quiet for around a month.
Finding a new job and putting in my notice:
I started looking for a new job, and found a very menial entry level job at a new company. It paid $11.00 per hour and had insurance, which I'd never had before, so I jumped on it. They told me that I'd be starting in 20 days, so I prepared to put my notice in.
As luck would have it, the diabolical wife-boss of doom decided the next day that she would pull my 2nd shift person and move them to another store for the day and force me to work a double. I worked my shift and went to the office and told the husband-boss I would quitting. Because they were fighting, the wife didn't get this memo for literally 16 days. She found out the friday before my last day of work there and literally lost her mind.
How malicious compliance cost them nearly ten thousand dollars:
After finding out about my notice, the wife rushed over to my store with her favorite cronie from the business office and demanded that I remove my administrator rights from all of the registers I had rights for at the stores, thinking I would sabotage them. I told her this wasn't a good idea, and suggested that I convert my account into an account someone else could later take over. You see, my account was the super admin for all of these registers, and there were no other administrator accounts other than the back door account that the vendor puts in by default. She insisted. I complied. I knew this was going to be a shitstorm, but I had no idea how bad it would be.
So I proceeded to end my shift by following them to three stores and delete my account off of the registers. Little did they know that the “openers” at those stores were using my account for all of the item adds, price changes, AND gas price changes. After completing this, I clocked out and she told me not to bother with my last shift. I ended up having a full 3 days off before starting my new job the following tuesday.
Monday morning I literally wake up to 40 texts, 25 phone calls, and 6 voice mails from the wife, another opener, and an office worker. Apparently, they didn't realize that the machines had been set up with only one super admin account that anyone working with them could access and the price of gas had gone from around $3.00 to $3.88 over the last three days and no one could figure out how to change the prices. I just said “Look I told you this would happen, and I don't work for you anymore.” The wife threatened me, screamed, cussed, and freaked out, but I just laughed at her and blocked her number.
Later that day, her husband called and was calm, but upset about the whole situation, and I explained exactly what transpired. Turns out, the vendor had come out and told them that they would need to rebuild one of the three registers because their backdoor admin credentials had fully expired on them and they didn't have any way to restore it. This would take 8 hours per store, plus the time to manually add the bulk of the items which would be 6 or 8 hours more during which the store would have to run off of an old cash register that required manual price entry. No gas would be sold at these times.
I was told that the one store was mostly down for four days, and four other employees quit during all of this.
The fallout:
I know a lot of stories like this lead to all the businesses going under, but ultimately my malicious compliance cost them around $10k from the vendor, plus lost sales.
Also, remember how they kept records of the overtime they were paying in cash under the table? One of the office workers had graduated with his masters got a job with the federal government a few months later. When he left, he apparently emailed their excel sheet with all the overtime to the IRS, the Board of Labor, and a bunch of other places.
They ended up having to pay a ton of money as well, but after 30 years of scummy business practices this just meant selling a boat and a renting out their vacation home.
I know that a lot of people can't wait for the wife in this situation to die so that they can turn her plot into a gender neutral bathroom.