Malicious compliance

I'd not even call it malicious. Just compliance

Even aside from the stupidity in this.

What is even the point of demanding every worker to take a break at the same time? What possible improvements would it create?

I often feel bosses do not think a lot about what improvement any decision of theirs would create

Why the fuck is “panicked” censored?

Engagement bait.
- It worked
- Figured. Fucking hate this stupid trend
- My god that's pretty much the only explanation, I was wondering why such a normal word was censored
Might not be, could just be an accidental markup that they didn't notice. I've definitely made little stray marks like while editing a picture.
To trigger people like you?

A malicious compliance story that is actually malicious compliance! It’s been a while.

Eh... I'm of a "that happened" mindset. Maybe it's just me, but I have a hard time believing even a moronic manager couldn't have foreseen the problem with this edict.
- I've definitely had a few managers who were this fucking dumb.
- Interesting. I didn’t doubt the dumb manager part, but I find it hard to imagine the entire workforce maliciously complied that way.
  Getting groups of people to coordinate for their own best interest is harder than it should be…
- There are people who never learn to bounce ideas off of other people first.
- If this was real, OP would've included the part where the manager threatened to dock the pay, but of course, this is just cliche "creative" writing where every story ends in "happily ever after"

Only tangentially related, but I used to have a decent boss and then a particular coworker arrived. He would find loopholes and cracks and breaking points of literally every single bit of flexibility we had. Eventually, we lost almost all of it. We had a strong union and this new guy knew how to abuse that. He didn't get caught breaking any rules, but it was obvious that he was using any flexibility to avoid it being provable. Took like three years before we got rid of him.

Honestly, depending on what it is, if the rules suck then it’s the rules’ problem.
At my last job I was told that they didn’t do overtime but I could bank hours. At some point they said that the spirit of it was that I could use those hours on the same project, not really to make up for missed time during the whole month. But see, overtime hours are always loaded towards the end of a project which would just mean I’d be giving them free labour when I was already not paid that well. I kept track of my extra hours and used them all the time to make up for missing whatever and while I don’t feel at all bad I’m sure their thought is that I was cheating their stupid, shitty system.
If managers and executives want to get paid so much money for being so smart then you’d think they’d be intelligent enough to do create decent rules. But we all know that they’re not so here we are.
- I partially agree, and it is important for rules to be exact in large systems. But if it was possible for them to be a bit more loose, and for people to still follow the spirit, then you would be able to give people a lot more freedom. But, it's almost impossible to make rules that are lenient enough for people to actually enjoy them without them being so lenient that some people will exploit them. This can typically work in small scenarios with a few people that know each other well. And in those cases, it's very useful to have a set of relatively lenient rules that allow people to act based on their discretion. But, as soon as you have a large group of people, this breaks down, as people don't feel the same attachment to each other/the group and their responsibility.
- There's never an excuse to feel guilty about skipping unpaid work. No pay no work. You already donate your commute to them.
I would say that is not a decent boss then. At least, not for that employee.
If a worker is making their colleagues unhappy by being an ass, management should be willing to take appropriate action.
I inherited some workers with bad attitudes when a company I was at merged two teams. On paper it was impossible to fire them, so I wasted so much time trying to get them to fit in. After a year I gave up and went to HR who was like, "oh yeah no problem we'll let them go". I didn't even think that was possible, based on our management training, but it turns out that since their shit attitudes and associated shit performance were well documented it wasn't a problem. We just paid them severance and off they went.
I was worried about the impact on the other employees, but everyone was happy to see them go.
I talked to one of them months later and he actually thanked me. It turned out that he was unhappy with the job but unable to get motivation to move on. He ended up at Greenpeace for a while; I don't know how long he stayed there... we were not friends. 😅
- Our union is pretty strong and they were obligated to defend him. This dude also lawyered up for everything - it was like a second job for him. Anything added to his record would be challenged, amended, or argued that everyone else also did something technically similar so they should all be written up, etc. Also didn't help that he knew exactly how to piss of my boss and my boss lost his cool once and cursed him out. I think that added another 12+ months to the guy's employment since now he could argue my boss had something out for him personally.
  He loved the power it gave him and he virtually scammed every system to "legally" (again, nothing obvious enough to get caught) get rewarded for it in most cases. Most organizations will eat this cost of giving in to these shitbags just to get rid of them in the moment.

I feel like this kind of thing has a subtle second layer of frustration. The boss in this scenario might have learned why flexible lunch breaks are a good idea, but I doubt he learned the next level up idea of, like, listen to your workers. They might have learned about this specific scenario but don't learn anything more broadly applicable.

This is a good example of what kind of person wants to become a manager, but actually makes the worst manager.
Somebody who believes that their ideas are always right, but never actually thinks them through. Somebody who believes that their position as a manager is proof that they are better than their subordinates.
- Yeah, it's a similar concept to how the majority of people likely to become cops (especially but not only in countries like the US where there's barely any effective restraints) should ABSOLUTELY not be allowed to become cops.
  Incidentally, both groups have a proportionally huge number of people with malignant narcissism and other personality disorders compared to people in general.

At least it appeared the boss understood the mistake. There might be hope for him or her after all.

Why is there a naked muscle man being censored? Free the naked muscle man!

Ok, maybe the boss didn't predict that they would just stop talking to customers mid-sentence, which is the malicious compliance part. But the boss didn't expect that there would be no one working from 12-12:30? Seems unlikely even for an idiot boss.

Chances are it didn't go down quite how it is described here.

Wayside School Principal vibes. Although at least he learned better.

Damn, I haven't thought about Wayside School in years. Those books were my jam!