Toxic Boss Realizes Too Late that His Kind of Ignorance Requires a Very High Price

Getting even with a toxic boss is one of the most gratifying feelings.

We don’t usually like taking revenge; we’d rather focus on being productive at the workplace and enhancing our knowledge and skills. But when we have a boss who’s always breathing down our necks, it can feel almost unbearable at times.

That’s when malicious compliance can give you relief!

This is one of those stories that had a toxic boss running around at his wits’ end after his latest directive backfired, throwing their company’s cybersecurity system into chaos.

The viral post was shared by u/MrWacko on Reddit’s popular r/Malicious Compliance forum. He wrote: “I (33M) work in IT Cybersecurity, and my work has been on a big multi-factor authentication (the SMS codes from your phone or authenticator apps type thing) push to better secure our systems. As a result, basically every system or software requires a phone to access it. Like many other places, my work does not supply phones to its workers unless they are sufficiently far up the leadership chain.”

Where did his “malicious compliance” come in? OP continued his post by saying that their boss — one of those notorious micromanager bosses — approached him with a directive that no personal device was permitted at work, such as a mobile phone.

OP thought it would be disastrous to get rid of his phone since it would jeopardize their cybersecurity system. But a directive is a directive, and so he uninstalled all the MFA code applications on his phone that were essential for his job. Then, he submitted tickets for acquiring the desktop versions.

The IT department was at a loss “Uhhhhh… What desktop version?” Realizing the problem that his directive created, their boss tried to backpedal. But, according to OP, it was too late since “all the tokens for the MFA apps were gone.”

Now, their boss had to rush approvals for software installation and got bogged down by the new software approval process that he had also imposed.

OP was happy to write the end of his post, “End result? I spend Friday browsing the Internet while he runs around rushing software approvals for the MFA desktop apps we need.”

Power corrupts. Power in the hands of a toxic person further corrupts his narrow brain and damages everything he touches.