r/MaliciousCompliance • u/Fast_Cloud_4711 • 16d ago
S Follow all managerial orders on Phone System decom with no questions asked
Happened in 2024:
Working on a phone system decom. 3800 phone #'s. 200 of them vanity #'s. Upper management running the project and they quickly get into mindset of not taking well thought out and reasoned feedback from the nerd bench. Got to the point of do what you are told, we aren't interested in what you have to say.
The vanity #'s are for C level suite, regional VPs, high earning sales people.
We have the meeting notes strongly rebuking engineering for pushing back on changes and that we are to simply 'comply'.
ATT service disconnect goes out for 3800 #'s and 200 vanity numbers. Takes 30 days for ATT and then shit REALLY hit the fan.
It was epic to be on a 67 person meeting and our service delivery manager show the CEO, CIO, CFO, CMO, and seriously pissed off sales, the upper management directive to simply follow all directives and no questions asked.
People were were shown the door right after and upper management changed significantly for the better. No one on the nerd bench took any offers of moving into either SDM or PM roles.
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u/LadyKona 16d ago
WUT? I feel like I went unconscious part way through the story and missed something… 👀
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16d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Axman6 16d ago
This is written like the TL;DR version, I got the gist but it felt like most of the story was missing. You’ve made a lot of assumptions that people know how a corporate telephone system works, what decom means and if so, the implications of doing that. The story is very unclear, and half the comments here are already saying that.
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u/MaliciousCompliance-ModTeam 15d ago
Your post has been removed because it did not forward the discussion and/or instead consisted of only insults, which is not allowed as per subreddit rules.
All violators of this rule are subject to bans at the discretion of a moderator.
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u/Aggressive-Fig-8734 16d ago
I know you implied it, but please consider rewriting the story to make the malicious compliance more explicit.
Otherwise great story - or at least the one I think you implied is.
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u/KarmaWhorediot 16d ago
Written like an autistic techo
The story I THINK OP is trying to tell: He and his team are tasked with a project to decommission 3800 phone numbers. Don’t know about OP’s country(USA?), but in Australia this releases them back into the public pool after a given time period. They are recoverable up until a certain point but can be an annoying process.
3600 of these numbers are generic, but 200 are specially chosen by VIP users. Special numbers are also worth money - someone paid the service provider for them to be special at some point. Instead of going through the hassle of giving these people the option to apply for change of ownership of the numbers, the project management team decide to take the simplest option and nuke them all.
Not clear from OP whether change of ownership presented some technical issues or was just more expensive and project management decided it didn’t matter enough to do (no time / no budget / cbf). Either way the project management team tell the technical team to stop talking about it and just proceed. It sounds like the project and service delivery management both agreed on this decision, contradicting their own technical and business process specialists (insane). OP’s team wisely formally records this in a meeting minute.
Malicious compliance is they proceed with the decommission even though best practice dictates they allow the users the chance to port out.
The users are pissed off. From my experience a lot of the 3600 regular users would want to have kept their numbers. The 200 VIP users are the noisiest though and escalate until the project team is fired along with the service delivery team.
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u/Illuminatus-Prime 15d ago
"The 200 VIP users are the noisiest though and escalate until the project team is fired along with the service delivery team."
The last two lines of the OP's post seems to imply (to me) that it was upper management that took the hits, not the honorable and hard-working techs and engineers who get things done . . .
"People were were shown the door right after and upper management changed significantly for the better. No one on the nerd bench took any offers of moving into either SDM or PM roles."
Either way, it's still a good MalComp story!
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u/KarmaWhorediot 15d ago
That’s part of why OP’s story is unclear - the directive was shown TO the CEO by the Service Delivery Manager. This sounds to me like OP is part of a BAU operations team leveraged by a project - the project managers made some bad choices and were let go.
Perhaps the team managing the project and in the role of project manager for this activity were also some executives/directors within the company rather than project management professionals - which would explain this weird decisionmaking without executive support
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u/bkwormtricia 16d ago
For those of us who do not know what SDM is, or PM roles, or what you mean by vanity numbers, this story is opaque.
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u/Dovahpriest 15d ago
Unless OP edited it, those two examples are in the last sentence, with OP saying that they were newly available roles, and you can reasonably infer from the term “vanity” that someone thought the numbers were important.
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u/armoredpiecrust 16d ago
So many acronyms. So little detail.
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u/lucyolovely 16d ago
Initalisms, not acronyms, but agreed.
(FYI an acronym is when it's pronounced like a word, think NASA and NATO, it's an initalism when it's separate letters, think FBI or CEO etc.)
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u/Dovahpriest 15d ago edited 15d ago
Only if you shut off your brain or are ESL/Outside the US.
C-Suite is mentioned earlier on, so it’s reasonable to assume the other guys next to CEO are also part of the C-Suite. VP is an extremely common shorthand for Vice President, and if you aren’t familiar with ATT, that just goes back to the outside the US/ESL point. That or you’re too young to have a phone or internet bill.
The only ones that are tricky to decipher are SDM and PM at the end, which you can infer are teams outside of the one OP is on, and have the relevant understanding necessary for the story.
EDIT: y’all definitely prove this study true:
https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-literacy-statistics
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u/Slight-Whole5708 9d ago
It's not that hard to add definitions of the specific jargon you're using in a story.
I'm a video game translator, if I start telling a story here about CAT tools, fuzzies, TBs, TMs and MTPE without explaining those terms, it's very rude.
And yes, not everyone here is American, shocker.
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u/Dovahpriest 9d ago
Sure, but we aren’t talking about “specific jargon”. We’re talking about terms like VP and CEO, two terms Reddit definitely knows if you check any mainstream sub that deals with politics and/or current events. It’s not unreasonable to assume people have come across those before. As for ATT, even adding the ampersand in between the Ts is going to be meaningless if you’re not already familiar with the company.
For the English as a Second Language bit, it’s almost like I called out that one as an exception for a reason.
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u/Slight-Whole5708 9d ago
I'm French but quite bilingual, and I'm not talking about CEO or VP, but "vanity number", PaaS, and indeed I would understand AT&T better than just ATT, because I watch John Oliver so I would have gotten that one. Fortunately I was able to research what vanity numbers are and I guessed what PaaS meant because I know "game as a service" due to my field, but it's annoying and it takes two second to define the terms and abbreviations you're using when writing a post. It's basic courtesy.
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u/solmead 16d ago
All you needed to add was “in the decommissioning the 200 vanity numbers would be lost, management did not want to hear about any warnings and said to just do what was asked, so we put in the cut over order and when the vanity numbers went away, the high level people with those numbers freaked and shit hit the fan. Then..,”
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u/NotBadAndYou 15d ago
And yet you (and I) understood them without the extra explanation...
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u/FixinThePlanet 15d ago
I did need the multiple comments spelling it out more to be sure of what I was vaguely inferring though
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u/CoderJoe1 16d ago
Swing a big enough dick around and eventually you'll hit yourself in the face.
(800) 555 FAFO
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u/johnlewisdesign 16d ago
Ahhh well there go the consequences of the vain people's actions! Smallest violin, haha well done
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u/phaxmeone 15d ago
While familiar with a lot of techno babble that doesn't include phone systems. I more or less followed the gist of the story but a big thank you to those who de-babbled it.
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u/Illuminatus-Prime 15d ago edited 15d ago
Hmm . . .
- Setup: Phone system decommission and changeover. Techs told to shut up and do as they're told.
- Compliance: Techs shut up and do as they're told.
- Malice: Implied that the techs know the C-Suite people are about to be badly inconvenienced.
- Fallout: 30-day suspension of service for the C-Suite people, at least some of whom were later dismissed.
Seems about right.
BTW: Those acronyms are abbreviations for titles, not names.
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u/Grant_Winner_Extra 15d ago
Just to be clear, this is just self-interested compliance.
Not malicious.
But the outcome was <chef's kiss> delicious.
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u/ActuallyYulliah 15d ago
I absolutely love this! 😘👌🏻
I mean, had to read it 3 times, but I love how ‘upper management’ basically acted like you were dumb peons, and then that fucked up upwards to top management, who pissed back downwards to ‘upper management’ and they got fired for being idiots…
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u/DoallthenKnit2relax 15d ago
I would have just shut him up by asking, "Do the top executives want to keep their direct dial-in numbers or would they rather take a month to reorder all their business cards?"
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u/AbbyM1968 15d ago edited 15d ago
Since it seems kinda technical, it might fit Talesfromtechsupport. You could ask their mods, anyway
ETA Many thanks to those who demystified it ... for us who din't understand
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15d ago
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u/MaliciousCompliance-ModTeam 15d ago
Your post has been removed because it questioned the validity of a story, which is not allowed on this subreddit, as per the subreddit rules, as it diminishes the fun of giving people the benefit of the doubt.
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u/EggmanIAm 16d ago
So to understand better: you were getting rid of a company phone system. But the numbers in that soon to be decommissioned phone system were still in use by big boy bosses and sales. You and your coworkers said it’s a bad idea and were ignored. Then phone system is shut down and all those bosses and sales lost their numbers?