Micromanaging boss insisted 'read receipts' on every email sent so they maliciously complied
Everyone was fed up, but no one could do anything except for an employee who found a sneaky way to push back.
This boss loved micromanaging everything at work; in fact, he was so obsessed with controlling everything that he would send numerous emails daily and demand a read receipt for each one, so he knew exactly when someone opened it. Everyone was fed up, but no one could do anything except for an employee who found a sneaky way to push back. They (u/fardistribution9031) shared the incident on Reddit on February 2.
In those days, the hovering boss used to own a BlackBerry mobile that notified him every time a read receipt came in. The employee somehow figured out a way to read the manager's emails without opening them. And that's when they came up with a brilliant way to trouble him without letting him know. So the person would save hundreds of emails and would wait until they knew the boss was busy at a work event or at home. Then they would click 'mark all as read' on all emails at once. "This resulted in the manager getting 100 emails through at the same time on his BlackBerry phone, along with 100 notifications," they recalled. The employee did it several times, and the manager was so frustrated that he finally dropped his read receipt obsession. "It felt like a minor battle had been won against him," they wrote in their post.
The corporate world is exhausting anyway, and a micromanaging boss makes survival even more difficult. A Monster poll found that about three-quarters of workers consider micromanagement a red flag in the workplace. The same survey found that 72% of workers reported "favoritism from a manager" as a red flag. In fact, having a good manager is so important for people that nearly half (46%) of respondents in a Ten Spot survey said they have a manager who makes them want to quit their jobs. Employees at senior levels (81%) also said they feel frustrated and consider leaving their jobs because of poor managers. This means, apart from professional growth, compensation, and work-life balance, people are also mindful of choosing companies with fair and supportive management.
Meanwhile, reacting to the Reddit post, u/funnyusername-123 commented, "I used to do something similar with a coworker. I figured out how to read the emails without marking them as read, and then I'd delete them. The system at the time would send a message to the effect of 'deleted without reading' (this was a long time ago), so he'd always see this message from me. I'd also usually undelete them, then reply a few days later just to mess with him even more." Similarly, u/duey1234 shared, "When people sent me emails with read receipts attached, I told Outlook to prompt me whether to send them or not. Almost every time, I declined to send the read receipt. It just highlighted to me that the person had specifically requested one, so when I knew, it went to the bottom of the list, and everyone who didn’t want a read receipt would get responded to first. I’d also sometimes reply to it and then send the read receipt some time after the reply."
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